Don’t be messin’ with the bad-ass mamas in African Cats. If you’re a couple of lion brothers comin’ over to say a goddamn “How do you do” from the ’hood next door, they will get all up in your shit. If you’re a tasty Thomson’s gazelle, you are going down, motherfucker. Your ass ain’t talkin’ your way outta this shit.

Whew! Got a little excited watching this live-action Disney documentary about lions and cheetahs that happens to be narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. But because this rousing doc is mostly aimed at innocents—although its big-cat protagonists defy any breathing human not to be grabbed by their real-life savanna sagas—Sam drops no goddamns.

These magnificent, muscled felines don’t need any help from bad words. Keeping time by the migrations of wildebeest and other meals on four legs in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve, the intrepidly nosy filmmakers follow Sita, a cheetah “single mother”, and her brood on one side of a crocodile-infested river, and lioness Layla and “daughter” Mara on the other. Yep, somebody went anthropomorphically nuts: all the cats have cute names they don’t even know they have!

What these feline “moms” do know is survival, and that means cuticle-gnawing action. Who needs Angelina when you’ve got a courageous cheetah tackling hyenas and a trio of guy cheetahs to protect her cubs? Lionesses ferociously ass-kicking humongous males is also a tad heart-thumping. The filmmakers play us fragile types by alternating “awww” moments of adorable cubs with menace that is, yes, sometimes deadly (generally off-screen).

Jackson waxes poetic about “the power of a mother’s love”, but the real thing is in these mothers’ ever-watchful eyes and in their anxious calls to their young. Oh, and celebrating chick power? Let Pam Grier narrate, and change Sita’s name to Foxy. Shit, yeah.