Ben Affleck built his directorial reputation on place — on the texture of Boston neighborhoods, the specific weight of working-class loyalty and moral compromise. Gone Baby Gone and The Town both knew their geography. Animals, his Los Angeles crime-and-politics thriller, does not. For a film set in a city that has spent a century eating its own mythology, it's startling how little of LA actually appears. The Kimballs' wealthy interiors swallow the film whole, and no amount of Robert Elswit's cinematography can make a rich person's living room feel like a city. The setup is solid enough on paper. Mark Kimball (Affleck) is an independent mayoral candidate — teacher, lawyer, Gulf War veteran, man of the people — whose preteen son is snatched on Halloween night. The kidnappers want $7 million he doesn't have. His campaign has a crucial event that same evening. His right-hand man Sam (Steven Yeun) wants to bring in a mysterious fixer (Gillian Anderson). His wife Abby (Kerry Washington) disagrees with everyone about everything. Ticking clocks, moral dilemmas, political stakes: the machinery is there. And then it mostly just sits there. The screenplay — co-written by Affleck, Billy Ray, and Connor O McIntyre — keeps its characters in rooms arguing in circles without building pressure. Secrets are revealed and then quietly defused. The kidnapper calls back, voice-modulated to sound like a Saw franchise sequel. Kerry Washington gives the kind of performance where you can see exactly how much she's working — overacting a whisper, as the review aptly puts it — because the material hasn't given her anything solid to push against. The film's biggest structural problem is one it shares with a recent competitor it didn't ask to have. Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest — his Manhattan-set remake of Kurosawa's High and Low — arrived first and made the bones of this story look borrowed. The ransom-drop sequence in Lee's film, set on a long subway ride traversing New York's socioeconomic strata, is genuinely bravura filmmaking. Animals offers a Los Angeles river basin standoff as its equivalent climax. The comparison is unkind but unavoidable: Kurosawa's original understood that the geography of a ransom drop IS the moral argument of the film. Animals seems not to have worked that out. Gillian Anderson alone seems to have read the room — or perhaps a different script. In an all-white suit, she plays the fixer as pure pulpy pleasure, calibrated to a different, more enjoyable register than anyone else on screen. She's right. The film should have picked a lane. Instead it aims for the prestige-thriller gravity of Affleck's earlier work without the earned weight, and ends up resembling its protagonist more than it intends: a charismatic surface straining to look more substantive than it is, declining to commit to an actual position. Affleck the actor is still watchable — there's something genuinely interesting in watching him play a politician who is visibly performing ordinariness, a man whose decency may be a performance of decency. That self-awareness could have been the film's spine. Instead it's a grace note in a movie that never decides what it's about. Elswit, who shot There Will Be Blood and The Town, delivers something the review accurately calls Netflix-y: slick, textureless, professional in the way that forecloses personality. At 100 minutes without credits, Animals is not a punishing watch. It's a forgettable one, which for a filmmaker of Affleck's capability is the sharper indictment.
