Like a reverse-engineered version of one of those "unlikely animal friends" viral videos, The Wolf and the Lion features actual wolves and actual lions that were raised together for the express purpose of starring in this poorly written family film. The interactions between the animals, especially when they're little, are cute enough to briefly elicit the same response as those short, plot-free videos. But the human characters are much less interesting, and the novelty of seeing the title characters bonding wears off as they grow from cuddly babies to ferocious adult predators.
Husband-and-wife filmmaking team Gilles and Prune de Maistre (Mia and the White Lion) seem to have put more thought into crafting their animal team-up than they did into character development or coherent plotting. Molly Kunz stars as Alma, a music student of indeterminate age and education level who returns to her family's private island after the death of her grandfather. Alma looks like an adult, but she studies piano at a conservatory where the students all wear uniforms like high schoolers. She's preparing for what she calls an "exam" that seems to also double as an audition for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, even though her school is in New York City.
Her family background is similarly flimsy, but it's all just irrelevant pretext to get Alma to the point of adopting a wolf pup and a lion cub. She inherits her grandfather's island and cabin in rural Canada, where her nearest neighbor is reachable only by boat. There, she discovers that her late grandfather had befriended a snow wolf, who's comfortable enough to enter the house and approach humans. The wolf brings her young pup along with her, to hide out from a pair of scientists who want to track the endangered wolves for conservation purposes.
Meanwhile, a small plane carrying an abducted lion cub bound for a circus crashes on Alma's land, and the lion cub escapes (the human pilot is briefly mentioned and never seen again). Alma's eternally patient godfather, Joe (Graham Greene), urges her to let the local wildlife service take care of the animals, but she ignores him, instead raising the pair essentially as pets, once the mother snow wolf is captured by the scientists.
That's a lot of awkward narrative maneuvering just to get Alma in place to take care of two animals who would never otherwise interact with each other. Kunz does her best to make Alma's motivations believable, even if she comes off as more selfish and deluded than nurturing. She names the wolf Mozart and the lion Dreamer, and the movie delivers some amusing shenanigans as the young animals get used to living with Alma.
The second half of the movie switches gears, presumably in part because the older, more dangerous animals could only have limited interactions with the human actors. After Molly gets injured accidentally, Mozart and Dreamer are taken from her — Mozart sent to live with his mother at a sanctuary for endangered wolves, and Dreamer returned to the circus he was initially intended for. The de Maistres throw in a late-breaking subplot about the circus owner's relationship with his sensitive son, and there's some half-hearted, chaste sexual tension between Alma and flustered scientist Eli (Charlie Carrick).
Both the characterization and the dialogue are stiff and clumsy, and the sweeping shots of the Canadian wilderness can only compensate for so much. The animals' quest to return home is unevenly paced and lacks excitement, and the eventual heartwarming message is muddled and a little disingenuous. Those silly viral videos are more satisfying, and a lot less time-consuming to watch. ♦
THE WOLF AND THE LION
