The rambling thriller/period drama/horror/true story(?)/white-man's-burden colonial tale is set in Tsavo, Uganda during the height of the British Empire. Val Kilmer plays John Henry Patterson, a colonel in Imperial Britain's version of the Army Corp of Engineers. He's sent by an inexplicably mean boss to Uganda to oversee the construction of a railroad bridge. Once there, he finds out that the local (or imported from India) construction crews working on the bridge are totally freaked out about some lion attacks that have snatching people up in the night. He immediately kills a lion. Just, blap, one shot, down. I worried for a moment that I had completely misjudged what this movie was about and was going to have to settle in for a long construction journal.
But no. There's more than one lion terrorising this labor camp. In fact, there's two more. The Ghost and The Darkness. That's what the laborers are calling them. Anyway, these lions just start cold killing anything that looks like a man in the middle of the night. They sneak up when people are sleeping and drag them screaming off into the shrubbery to kill them for no purpose other than to momentarily satiate the lions' endless bloodlust. The workers are pissed and blame this ill fortune on the white demon that recently showed up named Val Kilmer. No matter what he tries, these lions just keep boldly attacking the workers. Daylight, nightime, sunshine, rain, snow (er... not so much snow, it being Africa and all). These lion attacks just get absurdly brazen though. I mean I know their lions but come on humans! Strength in numbers!
Then out of nowhere Michael Douglass roles through with a pack of Masaii warriors looking like he would never somehow convince Catherine Zeta Jones to get with him. He plays Remington, a former Confederate soldier who has a southern accent for about 10% of his lines (which is still somehow a better showing than whatever the fuck Kilmer was going for with his Anglo-Irish character's accent!). Anyway, the two white guys try to save the day by heroically hunting down these man killing beasts which cleverly outsmart their bullets until the war of attrition is finally one by our heroic Kilmer. Triumphing over nature by building the bridge over a river and triumphing over nature by putting bullets into a bunch of lions, the world is man's now.
The story is based on a true (though likely highly embellished) story and the real lions were donated to the Chicago Field museum in the 1930s. But um... Michael Douglass's weird ass character is totally invented just so things don't go too "Heart of Darkness." This movie is definitely worth watching if only for this one weird dream Kilmer has where his wife and baby son are singled out and attacked by a lion in a crowd of people.
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