At least Spike Lee’s remix of Akira Kurosawa’s classic kidnapping drama High And Low, Highest 2 Lowest, respected its inspiration. Animals, which has the exact same premise as both films—and which was so similar to Lee’s remake that director Ben Affleck delayed production to avoid direct comparisons between the two—is ostensibly an original film, written by Affleck and a couple other guys who’ve definitely never heard of Kurosawa. Perhaps it really is just a coincidence that they came up with a broad, obvious, streaming-ready version of this mistaken-identity kidnapping quandary. Let’s take their word for it and assume, rather than being both a bad movie and a cheap knock-off, Animals is just the former.
For the first movie he’s directed since Air and the first directorial effort he’s had a hand in writing since Live By Night, Affleck puts himself in a mode he’s been successful at before: Smarmy, unscrupulous, under the gun. Taking advantage of the propensity for two-facedness he displayed in Gone Girl, Affleck plays loaded lawyer Mark Kimball, who’s running for mayor in Los Angeles as a self-financed Independent. Or, at least he was loaded, before he poured all his family’s money into his campaign, at the behest of his campaign manager (Steven Yeun) and behind the back of his therapist wife Abby (Kerry Washington).
That’s one of many superfluous problems floating around Kimball’s life during Animals, including his wife’s infidelity and his dipping popularity with L.A.’s Latino demographic. The main thing on his mind is that, after an infodump sets Kimball up as the perfect politician—intercut with a slick, near-parody montage of B-roll and swelling music—he receives a phone call from a Jigsaw-voiced stranger: His son Denny has been taken, and if he wants him back, he’ll need to come up with $7 million in cash before the night’s over. Only…has Denny been taken? He was out trick-or-treating with their housekeeper’s undocumented boyfriend’s son (get all that?), and they were wearing the same exact costume. Seems pretty plausible that the wrong kid got ‘napped.
If so, that would mean that the question now facing Kimball and his wife is whether or not to pony up cash they’d have to borrow for a kid who’s not theirs—admittedly a much easier position to be in than the one facing their housekeeper Ceci (Adriana Paz) and her boyfriend Ramon (Luis Gerardo Méndez), who are little more than token types despite their fretting and Kimball’s stream of reassuring Spanish. Those who haven’t seen High And Low will surely be titillated by this premise, but will quickly become like the rest of us: bored and ready for the film to actually get to the good stuff.
But after setting up this prickly situation, and introducing a shady high-level fixer (Gillian Anderson) brought in to handle the situation, Animals quickly runs out of dramatic depth. When Affleck and Washington aren’t blowing up at each other, airing out clichéd dirty laundry and tired stock complaints (The guy running for political office has been too busy!) at volumes and intensities meant to shake streaming viewers’ attentions away from their phones, they’re playing phone tag with Jigsaw, who never escalates his demands with any kind of threatening urgency. To that end, there’s never any real conflict between the couples in terms of how to approach this situation, with the fixer in terms of how financially solvent the Kimballs are, or with Kimball’s campaign manager in terms of how all this will affect his polling numbers.
In these lurches, the melodrama pauses briefly for characters to say all sorts of silly pretentious drek like “Humans are [just] animals who tell stories,” meant to conjure the specter of moral complexity out of thin air. A few lines and thematic threads hint at a film that once had more on its mind; the manipulation of (specifically Latino) voters, the unintended impact of good policies, and the racial specifics of Abby’s infidelity all seem like they used to take up more space. In their present state, they’re so underwritten as to be absurd, leaving them as odd dangling asides distracting from the main ransom plot.
If Animals was put together with Affleck’s typical meat-and-potatoes construction, this shallowness would be less pressing, and the potboiler thrills could stand on their own. But at some point between Air and Animals—perhaps when he founded and sold an AI startup to Netflix—Affleck became addicted to annoyingly rotating drone-like shots that make everything look more like a political advertisement than a feature film. Robert Elswit’s untethered camera is often loosely rising off into space or whirling away into the distance, doling out visual context at random. Combined with some truly laughable VFX, like Mac And Me levels of “I have to show this to a couple buddies” bad, the visual language of Animals is just as sloppy as its reheated script. The only good news is that those even vaguely intrigued by the idea of this movie have an actual masterpiece that they can watch instead.
Director: Ben Affleck
Writer: Connor O. McIntyre, Billy Ray, Ben Affleck
Starring: Ben Affleck, Kerry Washington, Gillian Anderson, Adriana Paz, Ray Fisher, Christopher Woodley, Matt Gerald, Jacob Estrada, Luis Gerardo Méndez, Steven Yeun
Release Date: October 9, 2026 (Netflix)
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