The Ghost and the Darkness (1996)
An old fashioned style adventure based on a true story but rather embellished, which stars Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas on the hunt for two lions that attacked and killed workers at Tsavo, Kenya during the building of the Uganda-Mombasa Railway in East Africa in 1898.
Featuring real lions and shot on location in South Africa, to look at the film is very promising, the lion attacks are well filmed and realistic - thankfully this was before the time of todays cartoon like CGI for everything routine - and Stephen Hopkins generates some real tension, but it's a film that's far from perfect.
Whilst Val Kilmer as the military engineer is fine, Michael Douglas' big game hunter comes across as a bit of a caricature cross between Indiana Jones and Han Solo. The originally asked Sean Connery and Anthony Hopkins you'd think would have done a better job but we'll never know. John Kani as Samuel the foreman on the railway, easily takes the acting honours with an accomplished performance and seems the one person best suited to screenwriter William Goldman's actual script.
I last saw this at the cinema and whilst it loses some spectacle on the small screen it's still an entertaining adventure.
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