Mark Reviews Movies: THE WOLF AND THE LION

The Wolf and the Lion, Blue Fox Entertainment

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | February 3, 2022

The story of The Wolf and the Lion doesn't really need an explanation, as long as one takes it literally. It's about a wolf, the cub of a rare and endangered breed, and a lion, captured in Africa as a cub to be brought to a circus, as they form a most unlikely bond out of necessity. Some humans play a part of that, for good and for ill, but they don't really matter. The filmmakers mostly care about seeing the cute cubs and, later, the more-intimidating older animals running and playing.

There's an actual story here, to be sure, but it's also irrelevant for the most part. Who needs one, as seems to be thinking of director Gilles de Maistre, when there's so much footage of the wolf and lion cubs crawling, jumping, snuggling, and doing all sorts of adorable things.

We get montage after montage of that, and later, when the cubs are no longer cubs, we occasionally get some similar sequences. The lion chases the wolf, pounces on the canine, and bats at its hindquarters with those clawed paws. Rarely has a movie felt as if it demanded the disclaimer that no animals were harmed during the production should pop up on screen every ten minutes or so.

Since the movie itself is mostly designed as an excuse to put this improbable pair together on screen, the definition of "harm," perhaps, deserves some deeper consideration in this case. Some closing text insists that the wolf and the lion that we've been watching are just as much friends in real life as they are on screen, so that at least offers some comfort that the big cat was only playing at attacking the wolf. It doesn't, though, feel right in the end.

Here's a movie with a pretty clear lesson, stated by the most important human character in clear language, attached to it: This lion and this wolf may have a cute friendship, but they shouldn't. It's only because of the actions of humans that they needed to become pals. If you're catching a hint of hypocrisy in that statement after simply reading about how the wolf and the lion in the movie are friends in real life, you've done more thinking than the filmmakers.

To be sure, their intentions seem to be pure, at least. We meet the lion cub on the African plains, snatched up by a hunter after the guy shoots the poor little cat's mother. There are plenty of shots of the little thing looking very sad in its crate, as it's transported via plane to a traveling circus somewhere in Canada to entertain people. Again, don't think about how the actual lion might have ended up on screen to entertain us.

The plane crashes, and the cub ends up stuck in a tree. It falls, with laughably perfect timing, into the arms of Alma (Molly Kunz), a music student in New York City, who has traveled home to the remote island owned by her recently deceased grandfather for his funeral. By the way, grandpa also made friends with a she-wolf that occasionally wanders into his house.

The wolf has a cub, as Alma discovers after bringing the lion home, and after the mother wolf is brought to a sanctuary by Eli (Charlie Carrick), Alma is left with the task of raising the two cubs. Months pass, and to the horror of her godfather (played by Graham Greene), Alma is taking care of a nearly full-grown wolf and lion. When Alma is injured (while trying to stop both animals from attacking a little girl and her mother, which might not be the best scene to include in a movie that otherwise attempts to evade the predatory nature of these animals), the wolf is brought to the sanctuary, while the lion ends up being drugged and abused in the circus.

The rest of the plot, of course, has Alma looking for the animals, but it also has the wolf trying to rescue its "brother" from the circus. The tone is light, except when it comes to the abusive circus owner (played by Evan Buliung), the cops hunting the animals through the woods, and the basic understanding—glossed over by the entire movie—that either or both of these creatures could kill Alma, Eli, the circus owner's kind son (played by Rhys Slack), and/or just about anyone else with whom they make contact. At the start and on the surface, The Wolf and the Lion provides the cuteness it mainly exists to provide, but if one gives the movie even half a thought, it feels like an insincere deception.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products