Is Animals Ben Affleck's Worst Film as a Director?
Ben Affleck has now directed six features, and the newest one landed on Netflix last Friday, October 9, with the weakest reviews of the lot. In Animals, Affleck plays Mark Kimball, an independent candidate for mayor of Los Angeles who has poured his money into a race he is narrowly losing. Then, on Halloween, in the last days of the race, Mark and his wife Abigail (Kerry Washington) learn that their son has been kidnapped.
If the setup rings a bell, it should. Chris Evangelista at /Film says the film "plays out like a loose remake of Akira Kurosawa's 'High and Low,'" the 1963 classic that Spike Lee already reworked last year as Highest 2 Lowest. That leaves you with three versions of one ransom story, and a fair question about the newest: is this the low point of Affleck's directing career?
Yes, on the record it is
The numbers are grim. Rotten Tomatoes has Animals at 38 percent and Metacritic at 33, a "generally unfavorable" verdict. Affleck's previous floor was Live by Night, the 2016 Prohibition gangster picture. That one scraped 35 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, but its Metacritic score was 49. On the weighted average that counts, Animals sits well below it.
The reviews explain why. Evangelista gave it 4 out of 10 and called it "just woefully average, maybe even a bit below-average." His sharpest complaint goes to the heart of a kidnapping thriller: "In theory, this should all be pretty harrowing, but Affleck never manages to convey any real sense of danger." Instead, he writes, the approach "is to simply have all the characters scream at each other." He also flags an ending that lands on "an extremely cynical beat that seems to be played as a kind of uplifting moment."
The cast deserves better. Steven Yeun plays Sam, the campaign manager who swears the debt can be repaid once Mark wins, and Luis Gerardo Méndez turns up as Ramon, the family's handyman. The performance /Film singles out belongs to Gillian Anderson as Dayle, the fixer who will front the ransom at a price. Evangelista says she is "fully embracing ice queen status" and admits he would "honestly prefer an entire movie about her character." Matt Damon was originally announced as star and co-writer, then dropped out to make The Odyssey, and Affleck stepped into the lead himself.
Skip it, and take the other two in this order
High and Low is the reason this story keeps coming back. Kurosawa gives the kidnapper a mistake to make: he grabs the chauffeur's son instead of the boss's, then demands the money anyway. That twist turns a ransom thriller into a moral test, and the film's geography does the rest, moving from an executive's hilltop house down into the city below once the police take over. Animals borrows the same mistake, swapping the chauffeur's son for the housekeeper's, which only makes the comparison harder on it.
Spike Lee's version is the confident cover. Denzel Washington plays David King, a New York music mogul, in the pair's fifth film together and their first since Inside Man. Its reviews (83 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, 74 on Metacritic) were warm, if not unanimous. Animals comes a distant third.
The Affleck worth your evening
None of this cancels the run he had. Evangelista calls Gone Baby Gone "excellent," says The Town is "still pretty darn good" even though it borrows from better crime films, and Argo won Best Picture and earned Affleck the Golden Globe and BAFTA for directing.
Our pick is Gone Baby Gone. It is Affleck's debut, adapted from Dennis Lehane, and it is also a story about a missing child: a four-year-old vanishes from her home and two private detectives with little experience of such cases take the job. If a child in danger is the hook you wanted from Animals, this is where Affleck already delivered it. Watch High and Low first, then Gone Baby Gone, and let Animals wait.
