Despite directing a Best Picture winner in “Argo,” Ben Affleck has always felt underrated as a filmmaker (and actor, to be honest, but one thing at a time). With films like “Gone Baby Gone,” “The Town,” and “Air,” the Oscar winner has shown an ability to tell old-fashioned, tight stories, the kind that people watch repeatedly for generations. It’s not as easy as it looks to make a thriller as taut as “GBG” or an action movie as rewatchable as “The Town,” and he’s also proven to have real skill with actors, a common trait among performers turned directors.
The promise of a taut kidnapping drama called “Animals” from a director who likely would have been more correctly lauded a half-century ago was incredibly promising. So it brings me no joy to say that this is easily Affleck’s worst directorial effort, a movie that clearly went through the Rewrite Machine a dozen or so times, losing important things like theme, focus, character, and tension.
Affleck plays Mark Kimball, a rising political star on the Los Angeles scene, hoping to become the city’s next mayor and, eventually, the next President. (The fact that we haven’t had a mayor become President in over a century is only a small part of what this film doesn’t understand about American politics.) Affleck was likely drawn to “Animals” for the potential conflict in Kimball: a man who preaches charity and inclusivity, but who faces trauma that challenges his progressive beliefs. While Affleck’s take on Kimball threatens to get ruthless, the script just isn’t daring enough to make him truly morally complex, even with the film’s convoluted conclusion.
Long before then, Kimball faces a conflict familiar to anyone who’s seen Akira Kurosawa’s “High & Low” or even Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest.” How this film doesn’t credit Kurosawa is beyond my understanding of the writing-credit complexities, given how nearly identical the setup is. Mark and his wife Abigail (Kerry Washington) get a call that their son has been kidnapped, leading to instant panic that brings in a ransom specialist named Dayle Burton (Gillian Anderson) and the heated advice of Mark’s political ally Sam Allison (Steven Yeun).
Of course, as anyone who has seen a movie can see coming, it’s not the Kimball child who’s been snatched, but the son of Mark’s housekeeper, Cecilia (Adriana Paz), and her illegal immigrant husband, Ramon (Luis Gerardo Mendez). Did they arrange the fake kidnapping because Mark wouldn’t give Ramon a job because of the political backlash? Again, this movie feints at hot-button issues like immigration and even political hypocrisy only to do absolutely nothing interesting with them.
“Animals” is credited to three writers: Connor O. McIntyre, Billy Ray, and Affleck, and it’s clear none of them worked together. From the shallow writing of Abigail, a character who we know almost nothing about other than the fact that she’s cheating on Mark, to the complete waste of Anderson on a part anyone could have played, it’s a script wherein everything interesting has been sanded down to pure exposition only.
Much has been written about how much Netflix makes product that’s increasingly designed to be watched with a second screen in your hand or while you’re folding laundry, but this is one of the most egregious offenders of that ethos to date. You barely need to pay attention. Heck, you can practically close your eyes and write the whole thing after the first few scenes. It’s that lazy a piece of writing, something that has been so focus-grouped and rewritten to death that it’s been drained of all of its personality.
And, most shockingly, it doesn’t even look as good as an L.A. movie shot by Robert Elswit should look. This man shot “Nightcrawler” and “Inherent Vice”! Why is this one so drained of any interesting visual language that one wonders if some of its city shots aren’t A.I.? (Affleck saying he used A.I. “for lots of things” here doesn’t help.”
“Animals” was once a vehicle for Matt Damon, who would have brought a very different energy to Mark Kimball. When he had to run and make “The Odyssey,” Affleck stepped in opposite Jennifer Garner, which would have given the film’s domestic drama scenes a heady bit of meta energy. For a film that’s so remarkably lifeless, it would have given this project much-needed teeth.
