Angry Animal/ Kilmer Watch: The Ghost and the Darkness (1996)

Watched:  04/02/2026

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Stephen Hopkins

Somewhere in The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), a movie that tells the curious tale of two rogue lions hunting and killing over 100 people that were part of an effort to build a bridge for a train in a remote area of Kenya, is a better movie.  My memories of this film were that Val Kilmer is great, Michael Douglas is not, and the one scene at the end totally had me.

A second viewing, almost 30 years later, and a glance at Wikipedia puts some weight on my suspicions - that Executive Producer Michael Douglas decided that if this was his movie, he would be prominently featured, and the movie would flail around on screen.  If there was a story to tell, it would become hopelessly muddied by the film's end.  

There's a perspective in 2025 that this movie should be about anti-colonialism, but this was 1996.  We were ending Apartheid and the reality of Colonialism in Africa was perhaps more just taken as fact at the time, anti-colonialism maybe still buried in academia in the US.  Hence, there isn't really an anti-colonial bone in the film's body.  We're still talking in terms of the 20th Century's concept of "progress", while acknowledging that conditions were often less than ideal.

Dispassionately, it's a fascinating time.  Money is pouring into Sub-Saharan Africa, changing cultures and establishing borders and nations where before it was regions with certain tribes and kingdoms were established - and the inability of Europe to see Africa as populated by actual people caused untold shockwaves of inhumanity.  I won't get into why this is all very complicated and ruinous here, but the echoes of that gold rush across the African continent continue very much into today.

The movie follows the purported real-life occurrence, which has a stranger-than-fiction vibe to it as lions pick off workers.  But the movie never quite grapples with the lion attacks in a way that is satisfying other than that the attacks occur.  The "why" - sometimes suggested to be mystical, other times just that the lions figured out humans are easy prey - isn't ever really sorted out.  I'm not sure how to fix this.  Nobody asks why the shark in Jaws is hanging around Amity island, just that it is.  But the movie keeps angling as if there is an answer which it just doesn't provide.

There's a suggestion we'll also get a story about the different ethnicities and factions pulled together to work on the railroad finding camaraderie, and that never materializes.  It just happens off-screen.  

What we do get is one movie for maybe an hour, about an Engineer trying to build his bridge to ensure the fortune and future of his family, trying to pull together a complex situation at the bridge site, and the horror of the lion attacks - and then Michael Douglas shows up.  He's a big game hunter with a kooky back story - he doesn't like killing!  he's a Confederate Civil War vet who somehow wound up in Africa! He has hair that makes him a candidate to join Creed!  For 45 minutes, it's Michael Douglas trying to play macho, and then he gets killed.  And somehow his death, the 135th death, is the one that *finally* drives our hero into the frenzy needed to take down the beast.  It is hokey and a lesser movie because of it, while dehumanizing the 134 other victims.

But in the mid-1990's, weirdly Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito were pitched to us as flawless hitmakers in the middle of this and Junior.  So I'm not sure people's brains could even conceive that Douglas kind of f'd up this movie by trying to make it in his own vision, and it seems like The Razzies, and others, tried to blame Kilmer and director Hopkins.

I do think there was an epic in the making here, but you can see all the 1990's-ness leak in around the edges of well-timed analogous anecdotes, empty but cool sounding phrases, Black dudes who think White dudes are the main character and cool.  Meanwhile, Kilmer feels like he's trying to make a less cookie-cutter movie about a man driven to the edge on the edge of his world - something we'd see in, say, The Edge a year later.

Part of why I think it's fair to ignore the Razzies (something I used to enjoy) is that they age like buttermilk left in the afternoon sun.  Kilmer is *good* in this movie.  Maybe not the best performance of his career, but he's carrying this movie against all odds and Michael Douglas trying to do an Al Pacino thing - and the Razzies thought he was the supporting player, which means they barely watched the movie (Douglas is *not* the lead).

My guess is that because Kilmer was trying to deliver a nuanced, semi-stoic performance in the film, Douglas coming in and tap dancing all over the place made him seem as if he's falling into the background, especially as he takes direction from Douglas.  Look, if you brought in Jerry Lewis for an hour of Lawrence of Arabia, and keep cutting to Jerry Lewis, we're going to lose some of what Peter O'Toole was doing without much dialog.

I remember thinking the movie was *fine* in 1996, but not great.  Now I'd have to downgrade it a bit. It has lots of good sequences, but struggles as a whole, and has an ending that feels oddly hollow.  The lions get killed and our hero's wife shows up.  But if a story is about how someone is changed from start to finish, what was gleaned from the experience, I think a lot of that didn't make the movie - and director Hopkins has stated that 45 minutes was cut in post by Douglas.  

Oh, well.  The likelihood we'll see much about this era in movies again in my lifetime is likely very low, so don't expect anyone to try to make the movie that this maybe was supposed to be.  And we do have a lot of reckoning to do with the Pre-WWII period in Africa - and after.  There's maybe a version of this from one of the local's perspectives that might be a wild ride.