What is it that so fascinates Ben Affleck about kidnapping? His career behind the camera has frequently returned to the subject: his excellent directorial debut, 2007’s Gone Baby Gone, was all about the search for a missing four-year-old, while his entertaining 2012 Oscar-winner Argo dramatised the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. There are even kidnapping elements to 2010’s The Town and 2016’s Live By Night. And so it goes with Animals, perhaps his weakest directorial effort so far but one still with some merits.
Affleck here casts himself as Mark Kimball, a lawyer and army veteran-turned-wannabe politician gunning to be mayor of Los Angeles. An opening-credits montage plays out like a political ad campaign, showing Affleck — a figure never afraid to show his political stripes off-camera — making for a very believable career-politician type, square-jawed and sharp-shouldered. It marks a clear contrast for the rest of the film, when his feathers become significantly ruffled.
For Mark is about to have, as his kidnapper promises through a voice-modulated phone call, the worst day of his life. While out trick-or-treating, his son is supposedly kidnapped, leaving Mark and his wife Abigail (Kerry Washington) in total panic. Playing out their sudden new reality in real time with a stressful oner, Affleck authentically abandons all calm here, the couple’s response to the crisis immediately moving to frantic, breathless and shouty.
It’s here that things start to devolve into genre silliness. When the Kimballs can’t raise the $7 million ransom demanded by the kidnappers, Mark’s snakelike adviser Sam (Steven Yeun) suggests a somewhat more legally grey option, hiring the mysterious Dayle (Gillian Anderson, in Iron Lady mode) as a kind of white-pant-suited Winston Wolf. She solves problems. She is also one of the more overwritten characters, lumbered with dialogue like, “Leverage is the balance between the allure of incentive and the consequence of refusal.”
Affleck is clearly trying to pitch this film as the kind of chewy mid-budget potboiler thriller they don’t make anymore, and there are flashes of that here. There’s some nice stuff about the secrets kept in long-term relationships (“In marriage, like any criminal conspiracy, you’re either all in or all out,” says Mark, cynically) — which would have been a fascinating watch, had Affleck’s real-life ex-wife Jennifer Garner played Abigail, as she was originally cast.
Ultimately, though, it feels a little disposable, somehow designed more for streaming than the weighted theatrical fare of his earlier directorial efforts. There are some neat moral quandaries to get your teeth into, and some genuinely interesting social and racial politics weaved into the narrative, but also some very cheap and obvious tropes leaned on, and a very silly deus ex machina in the final big blow-up. Let’s hope his next kidnapping film lands with more success.