Ben Affleck has directed plenty of good movies, some of them great. It takes considerable skill to make a crime thriller as energetic and rewatchable as “The Town,” just as it does to turn a historical drama like “Argo” into a Best Picture winner. Even his more modest efforts, like the Michael Jordan-inspired Nike drama “Air,” demonstrate an understanding of character and the kind of old-school storytelling that Hollywood rarely makes anymore. His directorial debut, “Gone Baby Gone,” remains an especially effective exercise in moral ambiguity. Which makes “Animals,” a bargain-bin kidnapping thriller filled with political buzzwords, awkward shouting matches and characters who barely register as people, all the more disappointing. Affleck has made a few misfires throughout his career, but this one belongs alongside “Live by Night” as one of his most lifeless efforts.
It’s particularly frustrating because a morally complicated kidnapping drama should be right up Affleck’s alley. He knows how to build suspense around desperate people making increasingly questionable decisions, often allowing their circumstances to expose the contradictions beneath their convictions. Yet “Animals” struggles to generate even a fraction of that tension, despite having a premise practically designed for it. The performances are strangely disconnected, the dialogue rarely sounds convincing, and the screenplay keeps introducing potentially interesting conflicts without doing much of anything with them.
Affleck plays Mark Kimball, a rising political figure hoping to become the next mayor of Los Angeles. He’s charismatic, polished and knows how to say all the right things, particularly when it comes to helping the city’s marginalized communities. Naturally, those convictions are put to the test when his comfortable existence comes under threat. There’s a compelling character somewhere in Mark, a man whose progressive ideals prove remarkably flexible once his own interests are at stake. Unfortunately, the screenplay never digs far enough into that hypocrisy to make his predicament particularly revealing. What should be a gradual unraveling of his moral principles instead becomes a series of predictable decisions that tell us little we couldn’t have already guessed.
Anyone who recently watched Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest” might experience a strange sense of déjà vu when Mark and his wife Abigail (Kerry Washington) receive a phone call informing them that their son has been kidnapped. Desperate to keep the situation contained, they enlist the help of a fixer named Dayle Burton (Gillian Anderson), recommended by Mark’s political ally Sam (Steven Yeun). Except there’s a catch: the abducted child isn’t actually theirs, but the son of their housekeeper Cecilia (Adriana Paz) and her undocumented husband Ramon (Luis Gerardo Méndez). The kidnappers are demanding $7 million for his safe return, leaving Mark to decide just how much his public commitment to helping others is worth when the consequences become personal.
It’s a provocative setup, particularly with the class and immigration dynamics at play, but “Animals” has remarkably little to say about any of them. The contrast between Mark’s political rhetoric and his private behavior is obvious enough, yet the film treats that contradiction as though its mere existence constitutes meaningful commentary. Cecilia and Ramon, meanwhile, are largely reduced to instruments of Mark’s moral dilemma rather than fully realized people with their own fears and frustrations. Their circumstances should complicate the story and force Mark to confront the very inequalities he claims to oppose. Instead, the screenplay keeps circling the same basic questions without developing them into anything especially illuminating.
Credited to three writers, Connor O. McIntyre, Billy Ray and Affleck, the script also does little to distinguish its supporting characters. Washington is particularly underserved as Abigail, whose defining characteristic seems to be her infidelity. Her affair with a character played by Ray Fisher, who is top billed and has approximately five seconds of screen time, feels like a subplot that lost most of its connective tissue somewhere in the editing room. Anderson fares little better as Dayle, a supposedly formidable fixer whose reputation does considerably more work than anything she actually accomplishes. Both actresses are capable of bringing considerable dimension to complicated characters, but they’re given so little to work with that their presence hardly registers beyond the novelty of seeing them in the same movie.
Even more baffling is how little visual personality Affleck brings to the proceedings. Cinematographer Robert Elswit, whose work on “Nightcrawler” and “Inherent Vice” captured Los Angeles with such distinctive texture, makes the city look unusually sterile here. The images have an unpleasant digital sheen, draining the locations of any atmosphere and making the whole production feel strangely anonymous. For a filmmaker who has previously demonstrated such a strong command of geography and escalating tension, Affleck seems content to let scenes unfold without much urgency or visual imagination. Even the confrontations, which should carry the weight of increasingly desperate circumstances, are staged with a flatness that makes the characters’ constant yelling feel like a substitute for genuine dramatic stakes.
Ultimately, “Animals” is the sort of disposable Netflix thriller that seems designed to be watched with one eye on your phone. Not because its story is particularly difficult to follow, but because so little of what happens demands your attention. There’s a potentially sharp examination of political hypocrisy, privilege and the limits of personal conviction buried somewhere beneath all the manufactured urgency, but Affleck never finds a compelling way to bring those ideas together. For a director who once made morally tangled stories feel so immediate and consequential, it’s disappointing to see him settle for something this thoroughly forgettable.
ANIMALS is now streaming on Netflix.