‘Animals’ Review: Ben Affleck Returns to the Director’s Chair for a Nasty, Compulsive Kidnapping Thriller

It’s for the best that “Animals,” actor Ben Affleck‘s sixth outing behind the camera, is being released directly to Netflix — not that this slick, pacy serving of all-star pulp couldn’t or wouldn’t hold one’s attention in the multiplex. But ever since Affleck’s rousing, enjoyable political drama “Argo” won a Best Picture Oscar that it perhaps didn’t entirely need, his subsequent efforts have been burdened with the weighty expectations of a prestige filmmaker — the noirish, overbaked flop “Live by Night” certainly didn’t benefit from those, and while the fleet-footed crowdpleaser “Air” rallied nicely, it wasn’t a major work either. Affleck is, at heart, an audience-minded journeyman: Screwy and silly when it doesn’t sporadically hit you with a stray hard truth, “Animals” is disposable pulp, but it benefits from its director-star’s unassuming professionalism.

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“He can’t enforce laws that he doesn’t abide,” says Abigail (Kerry Washington), the perfectly put-together wife of Affleck’s character Mark Kimball, a wealthy Los Angeles attorney now pivoting to politics with a well-funded mayoral run. The second she says it, mere minutes into proceedings, is when you know we’re about to wade through some extreme moral murk — heavily contrived by Affleck with co-writers Billy Ray and Connor O. McIntyre. At its most incisive, the film hits the pressure points of good, needling political satire, and if it pressed them just a little longer and harder, we could have had something quite potent here. But “Animals” also has other, more lurid matters to attend to — some heated marital melodrama, some hollow “what would you do” button-pushing — and if these high-low tonal extremes strip the film of some gravitas, they keep it plenty gripping.

“Animals” opens with one of Mark’s extended campaign ads — a knowingly smarmy compilation of buzzwords and patently false man-of-the-people imagery, hitting all the necessary demographic targets, and working awfully hard to conceal the fact that the former lawyer and his family occupy an enviable Beverly Hills property worth over $10 million. So far, the people aren’t quite buying it: As Mark’s all-business campaign manager Sam (a disappointingly flat role for Steven Yeun) informs him, he’s still lagging in the polls, with the city’s Latin vote especially far from his grasp. How can that be, when he and Abigail are so good to their Mexican nanny Cecilia (“Emilia Pérez” standout Adriana Paz)?

Well, good within legal limits: When Cecilia asks if they could possibly offer some work to her boyfriend, illegal immigrant Ramon (Luis Gerardo Méndez), Abigail briskly explains that doing so could endanger her husband’s campaign. Still, it’s Halloween, and she and Mark trust Ramon enough to take their son Denny (Christopher Woodley) out trick-or-treating with his own, while they attend to more important matters: more campaign prep for Mark, and an online tryst with an extramarital lover for Abigail. So when Mark gets a call from a malevolent mystery predator, claiming that he’s taken Denny and demanding a $7 million ransom, multiple streams of guilt come into play.

What begins as a fairly straightforward kidnapping thriller is ratcheted by turns into something more complicated, if not exactly complex, by a neat series of twists. A couple of those are easily forecast, but the crucial one is fiendishly spring-loaded, deftly shifting the stakes of the whole enterprise, and testing Mark’s integrity both as a man and as a politician. Affleck, always at his best in roles that place his all-American alpha qualities under a harsh, sweat-inducing spotlight, has cast himself ideally here. His performance, at first glib, is so convincingly unnerved that you almost don’t need the faintly absurd foil character of Dayle Burton (Gillian Anderson) to tighten the screws.

An enigmatic British fixer called on by Sam to secure the ransom — since Mark’s fortune has largely been sunk into his campaign — Dayle’s purpose is mainly to strut around the place with intimidating serenity in a crisp white pantsuit, and to deliver dialogue like “Everyone’s beholden to something, that’s big boy life” in a cut-glass accent that only renders it more ludicrous. Her arrival is most entertaining, and also a clear signal of the film’s imminent takeover by its own trashiest instincts: Little in “Animals” rings true from here on out, but you still want to know where it’s heading, and how snakily it’s going to get there.

Still, for a few tantalizing minutes after its biggest bombshell, the film dangles the possibility of something starkly and breathtakingly true: a glimpse of America at its cruellest and most unequal. It never matches that — despite a broadly satirical and rather amusing coda that deservedly pokes fun at a national tradition of macho personality politics. The rest of the filmmaking, too, is content to coast at a lower difficulty setting, from the proficient but anonymously taupe lensing by master DP Robert Elswit to an untested ensemble of ever-watchable actors playing capably to type. “Animals” is a tart, nasty diversion, where it could be something uglier and more lingering. But you can’t blame Affleck for instead just getting the job coolly and efficiently done.