Review: Unnecessary ‘Mufasa’ shows the Lion King franchise to be running out of lives

Barry Jenkins signing on to direct a spinoff to “The Lion King” sounds like a joke you’d crack after “Moonlight” won the Oscar for best picture, less at the filmmaker’s expense than at an industry that’s gotten cagey about funding his kind of heart-driven talent. In the ’90s, Hollywood might have handed him its checkbook. This decade, though, just getting a big movie green-lit takes a cat fight. “Mufasa: The Lion King,” from a script by Jeff Nathanson, has taken up a substantial amount of Jenkins’ bandwidth — it was first announced in 2020. You stalk the film trying to find him in it, but there’s not much more than an ethereal interlude in which three lions flirt in the grass.

This is a guaranteed blockbuster that nobody needed except studio accountants and parents. I’ll accept it on those terms because it’s a good thing when any kid-pleaser gets children in the habit of going to the movie theater. Yes, it’s easy and necessary to mock Disney for squeezing every last drop out of a franchise. Heck, Disney’s even learned that it can be lucrative to make fun of itself, which happens here when one animal groans, “Please don’t mention the play again.” And now, the company’s zeal for prequels has resulted in a movie about two kittens who we’ve all seen meet a grisly death. To my morbid delight, “Mufasa” starts off by killing one of them again.

The framing device is that Simba and Nala (Donald Glover and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter) have handed their daughter cub, Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter), to three familiar babysitters: Pumbaa the warthog (Seth Rogen), Timon the meerkat (Billy Eichner) and Rafiki the psychic mandrill (John Kani), who insists repeatedly that he is not a baboon. Rafiki recounts the origin story of Kiara’s grandfather while, at a cadence that ticks like a nervous executive’s pacemaker, Pumbaa and Timon interrupt for atonal comic relief: “Less childhood trauma, more meerkat!” Timon wails.

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Mostly, we’re roaming Tanzania with an orphaned whelp named Mufasa (voiced in his youth by Braelyn and Brielle Rankins, and in his prime by Aaron Pierre) and his adopted brother Taka (Theo Somolu and later Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who hails from a royal lineage. My quibble with the original “Lion King” and its 2019 remake is that Simba is a one-note brat. Mufasa is even worse — he’s flat-out flawless — and the other characters can’t resist commenting on it. “You are the lion who can do everything,” purrs one female in heat (Tiffany Boone). That’s no exaggeration. Among his innate gifts, Mufasa proves to be an expert in elephant migration patterns and botany.

To further the hagiography, the script flubs its own plot points. Early on, there’s a fight where, apparently, Mufasa murders an unnamed lion. Except you wouldn’t know that happened from anything onscreen until a follow-up beat where the dead lion’s father, Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen), learns that his child died of his injuries at some point between scenes. Kiros’ quest for vengeance is a through-line of the film, and the kill is Mufasa’s first blood (though it won’t be his last). Yet the moral impact doesn’t seem to occur to our noble hero at all.

The line readings are flat-footed. Mufasa and most of the other lions sound like theme-park animatronics with voices set to “Soothe.” Adding to the homogeneity, the core characters — and I’m referring to a half-dozen-plus beasts here — share the same backstory: They miss their families. The daddy/mommy/brother issues become so repetitive that it’s a relief when Zazu (Preston Nyman) the hornbill never mentions a long-lost egg.

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Taka, the more cowardly lion, will eventually earn a name that isn’t going to surprise anybody. The bigger jaw-dropper is: Why wasn’t this movie pitched as “Scar”? This innately good-hearted princeling is the only compelling character. From his point of view, Taka can make a legitimate case that a golden god like Mufasa is exasperating to be around — this stray has literally destroyed his pride. Plus, Taka’s voice actors, Somolu and Harrison Jr., deliver dynamic performances with mercurial emotions and a delightful Cockney accent. During the song “I Always Wanted a Brother,” the photorealistic lion croons about his “bruvaah” with the surreal gusto of Growltiger in “Cats.”

The subtlest animation looks the best, especially when sunlight dapples upon fur or felines flex their claws to assert power. (I write this while struggling to keep a 20-pound Maine Coon off my desk.) There are opportunities for dreamlike images: a flock of birds zooming like warplanes, a herd of antelope emerging from a horror-movie mist, and an unexpected amount of gorgeous and terrifying swimming sequences as these so-called kings of the jungle are continually bested by gravity and water. Occasionally, the look goes gonzo for viewers watching the movie in 3D. Think a slow-motion raindrop hurtling toward your face, or shots of the animals racing around like they’ve got a GoPro camera on their collar.

The ending feels similarly rushed, although there’s nothing in particular I’d rather spend more time with than the songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda. The cast belts them at a terrific, breathless, breakneck pace, scaling octaves as demanded. There are only a few numbers, but most of them are marvelous constructions with sinewy arrangements and overlapping harmonies that tangle around each other during duets. Good luck pulling them off at karaoke. But it’s hard to call any one song a showstopper. They aren’t built for bombast, and none are as in-the-moment earwormy as “Hakuna Matata,” although there’s a slithery villain’s ditty by Mads Mikkelsen that became my favorite once I came around to the lyrics: “Cause I’m gonna be / the last thing you see / before you go / bye-bye.” I still think this prequel didn’t need to exist, but at least I left humming.