Animals

I’ve been out here pumping up Ben Affleck’s directorial tires for as long as I can remember.

Then Animals shows up on four fucking flats and asks me to keep pumping.

If you’re just here for thumbs up or down, head out now. Greenlighting this thing was a worse decision than trying to do a prostate exam over Zoom.

I can’t fathom a way to rebrand this as something that works, so let’s just get through what doesn’t.

We’re thrown into the day-to-day of a politician, Mark Kimball (Affleck), who’s stressed out by stuff I assume we’re meant to look back on as mundane. His housekeeper wants him to hire her undocumented boyfriend. His campaign chief is asking him to pledge his life savings to win an election but doesn’t recommend telling his wife about it. His wife Abigail (Kerry Washington) is cheating on him, but he’s seemingly too concerned about how he looks on the ’gram to care.

That’s the sum total of the character development before the world’s worst monster voice gives the budding mayor a ring to let him know what kind of movie this is. His son has been abducted, possibly by a guy with a normal voice who just happens to be speaking through a fast food drive-through speaker in desperate need of replacement. The campaign manager, apparently also in charge of the kidnapping desk, summons Dayle (Gillian Anderson), a vaguely British fixer. And just as Dayle arrives and threatens to make things interesting, the couple’s “missing” son turns up too.

Oooooh wait a minute. Maybe this is an original story after all.

With the child recovered, Animals has to manufacture an entirely new reason for us to panic. So far, the only thing that sounds like it’s still being held hostage is the kidnapper’s microphone.

Blame Kurosawa, I guess.

Theoretically, our reason for caring is political. Or financial. One of them. Rather than spend time developing this essential motivational wrinkle and right the ship, we spend most of our time dwelling on how long it’s taking Abigail to pick up what Dayle is putting down with her backup plan, Kinetic Plan B. Kinetic means motion. Bad guys won’t be moving after Kinetic Plan B is carried out. Ohhhhh now I think I get it.

For a movie called Animals, this thing is awfully house trained. A pallet of veritable plot explosives gets delivered to the Kimballs’ house over the course of the film, and exactly none of it manages to induce a little chaos. Every fresh catastrophe gets resolved in two or three frictionless minutes. By the end, I was convinced the kidnappers could demand cold fusion and Mark would have a working reactor before the next scene.