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Mufasa Movie Review

Mufasa is a 2024 musical drama film directed by Barry Jenkins and starring Aaron Pierre. It’s a very serviceable, but unnecessary sequel.

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“I’ll tell you a secret, Mufasa!

I always wanted a brother!“

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Mufasa, a cub lost and alone, meets a sympathetic lion named Taka, the heir to a royal bloodline. The chance meeting sets in motion an expansive journey of a group of misfits searching for their destiny. This is a sequel to its 2019 predecessor, which ranks among the worst Disney live-action remakes of all time. That was a pointless blockbuster that was a shot-by-shot remake with no soul to it whatsoever. Mufasa fares much better because it has at least an original story, but it’s still a rather weak effort overall.

There is a very obvious movement in today’s blockbusters to focus on extending their IP through unnecessary remakes and/or sequels and through silly fan service. This project suffers from both of those issues. Nobody really needed a Mufasa origin story, but we got one nonetheless. Even worse, not one person was in desperate need of extending ‘The Lion King’ universe through pointless origin stories for each object or character, but Disney obviously thought that we would appreciate this, which resulted in this baffling project.

It’s one thing to explain to us how Scar became the iconic Disney villain that we all know and love, but it’s an entirely different thing to give us the beginnings of the characters like Zazu and Rafiki. None of these subplots were important or really needed. They felt just like lazy fan service meant to cash in on our collective nostalgia for the original film. For God’s sake there is even a Pride Rock scene where we get to see how this famous rock was created. That moment made me laugh out loud how ludicrous it was.

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Now, the movie worked to a degree in its characterization that was surprisingly solid and emotional engagement that was also unexpectedly high at times, though of course mostly sitting on the manipulative side of things. Mufasa’s story isn’t all that interesting, but the decision to make him an outcast and a part of an adopted family of sorts worked for the movie and made it more modern in a way. Sarabi did not get much to do here unfortunately, but at least the protagonist and his arc largely worked.

But what they did to Scar is rather disappointing. At first, I really liked the dynamic between the two. Their friendship was genuinely sweet. But his turn to the bad side was basically just because he did not get the girl and he felt jealous. That made him feel too petty and basic, an arc not worthy of one of Disney’s biggest villains. The other characters did not get a whole lot to do, but I did appreciate that they included Timon and Pumbaa through those scenes in the future and they were as amusing as always.

Mufasa is not a particularly effective adventure story because it felt repetitive in the number of natural calamities included with way too many floods endangering our protagonist way too often. The result is an overlong and rather slight movie in plot. The score is solid, but the soundtrack is not great. Not only could it not compare to the original, but it also further proved to us that Lin-Manuel Miranda is a pretty overrated composer. I really liked I Always Wanted a Brother. That one was so catchy and vibrant. But the rest were all forgettable and dull. The effects were much better this time around as the animals at least have some facial expressions on them, but still the backgrounds look too plain and washed out in colors.

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