‘Animals’ Review: Ben Affleck Directs and Stars Opposite Kerry Washington in a Thriller Full of Juicy Elements That Should Be a Lot Tastier

There’s at least one animal in Ben Affleck’s sixth featue as director, and that’s the elephant in the room — or lumbering around the Los Angeles locations — of this passably entertaining Netflix crime thriller. There are mysteries in Animals, but the most pressing of them is whether anyone told Affleck that Spike Lee just last year released a zingy reimagining of High and Low, Akira Kurosawa’s masterful marriage of police procedural and domestic drama. The 1963 Japanese film is not some forgotten minor work but a widely known and influential genre classic, making it baffling that a movie so transparently indebted to it makes no acknowledgment of the inspiration.

Maybe it was a rights issue? In any case, Animals lifts most of its foundational plot elements directly from that source. Wealthy protagonist who has leveraged all his assets at considerable risk? Check. Wife kept in the dark about a financial gamble that could wipe them out? Check. Disenfranchised outsider stewing in poverty and resentment? Check. Botched kidnapping in which the wrong person’s son is taken? Check. Unease between loyal staff and well-heeled employers that casts a harsh light on the class divide? It’s all here.

Affleck and his co-writers Connor McIntyre and Billy Ray borrow that narrative skeleton intact, and it’s in their embellishments — tepid adultery, boring marital drama, pedestrian political maneuvering, cynical outcome that reeks of opportunistic chicanery to no one’s surprise — that the movie is at its weakest.

The main change that works is the addition of Gillian Anderson — when is that not a bonus? — as an extremely high-end ice-queen fixer in a slinky white suit and fabulous hair. She’s a hoot in a role that could not be farther from her sultry Blanche DuBois in psychosexual overdrive in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Everytime Anderson is onscreen as the enigmatic Dayle Burton, calmly reminding her clients that she will get her $1.4 million fee no matter the outcome — double if she’s required to introduce “kinetic energy” — the movie acquires a spicy tang that’s missing elsewhere.

Affleck opens with his character, Mark Kimball, mid-stump speech on the mayoral campaign trail. As a Gulf War veteran who has worked with the LAPD, the DA’s office and environmental groups to clean up and start rebuilding the city after the 2025 wildfires, he ticks all the boxes. He makes a point of speaking Spanish with immigrant communities, but his laser-focused campaign advisor Sam Allison (Steven Yeun) reminds him that he still urgently needs to boost the Latino vote.

As DP Robert Elswit’s camera takes note of a Mexican American family who will figure significantly in the plot, Mark — in the practiced soothing tone of a radio announcer — blathers on making promises like, “I will not lie to you” and “I will respect each and every one of you as equals.” Anyone who has ever seen a movie knows that means he will be breaking those promises before the story wraps up.

Mark’s wife Abigail (Kerry Washington), a therapist, smiles dutifully for the TV spots, but a hint of tetchiness in her voice suggests the marriage is not as solid as Mark believes. Abby has been having an affair for months with UCLA teacher Ron (Ray Fisher), who is eager to take it to the next level. But Abby worries about losing the trust of her preteen son Denny (Christopher Woodley) by bailing on his dad at such a strategic time.

Sam, who seems even hungrier for the win than Mark, stresses that they must increase ad spending to stay in the race, even if the self-financed campaign has already bled the candidate dry. Mark is reluctant to put up their impressive Westside home as loan collateral, but Sam persuades him that the risk will pay off and the election is all but sewn up.

As anyone familiar with the Kurosawa original or Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest will guess, that’s when the nightmare kicks in. While Denny is out trick or treating on Halloween with his nanny Cecilia (Adriana Paz, Emilia Pérez), Mark and Abigail’s son goes missing. They learn of this when the kidnapper calls to demand a $7 million ransom, threatening to dismember the boy if they contact the cops. Mark is forced to come clean about their precarious financial situation to Abby, whose anger is outweighed by concern for the safe return of their son.

Except…the abducted boy is not Denny. In the confusion of matching Halloween costumes, the kidnapper took Hector (Jacob Estrada), the son of undocumented ranchero Ramon (Luis Gerardo Méndez, Narcos: Mexico), whom Cecilia loves and wants to marry. When Denny strolls in, his parents figure out the mistake, their relief tested by the kidnapper’s insistence that the ransom remains the same. It’s then that Cecilia and Ramon come back to the house, frantic with worry and nervous about the Kimballs’ willingness to honor their promise and pay up, for the sake of the missing boy.

Despite the machinery of a well-oiled plot in place, the action becomes increasingly static, nowhere more so than when Abby’s extramarital transgressions come to light, prompting tense discussions with Mark — often with bad dialogue. Things are more interesting downstairs, where Dayle, who was summoned by Sam as someone uniquely capable of resolving the stickiest situations involving public figures, remains cool as a cucumber, never a platinum strand of hair out of place or a hint of emotion on her face. Not for nothing is Anderson an adored queer icon.

The dropoff action should be suspenseful, but earlier scenes in a foreclosed Frogtown warehouse, where an unseen man surveys the wreckage of his life with the implication that Mark is responsible, dilute any surprise.

In his accomplished early directorial efforts Gone Baby Gone and The Town, Affleck showed a sure hand balancing character-driven drama with spurts of action and violence. Here, despite the potential of gritty locations in the city’s under-policed northeast and a climactic act in the concrete-lined L.A. River channel, the confrontations become overly complicated and the execution of them messy.

What’s worse is the scene that follows, revealing the clean-up of multiple bodies and an elaborate rewriting of the narrative that strains credulity to put it mildly, not to mention shortchanging the Mexican characters. An appearance by Gayle King, conducting a fake interview with Mark, is the final eye-rolling insult.

Aside from Anderson, Paz and Méndez have moments of raw emotion in their scenes together, but Affleck and Washington never generate much heat, while Yeun mostly stands around looking shady. Still, these are highly watchable actors, and as a movie to have on in the background while making dinner, Animals — so named for the lawless beast inside all of us, not that there’s much traction in that theme — will play just fine on Netflix.

However, anyone craving a smart, multi-layered crime thriller about moral choices, marital trust, the casualties of capitalism, and the divisions of social and class structures should check out the riveting High and Low. All due respect to Ben Affleck, but he’s no Toshiro Mifune.