Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Ben Affleck
Starring: Ben Affleck, Steven Yeun, Kerry Washington, Gillian Anderson, Adriana Paz, Ray Fisher, Matt Gerald, Luis Gerardo Méndez
English language remakes of Kurosawa's 1963 thriller High and Low are like buses: you wait half a century for one and then three come along at once. Following Steven Soderbergh's mini-series Full Circle and Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest, we now get Ben Affleck's take on the setup in Animals. Unlike Soderbergh and Lee however, Affleck fails to credit Kurosawa, but make no mistake, this is just as much a remake of High and Low as Soderbergh and Lee's projects.
While Soderbergh and Lee transposed the drama to New York, Affleck opts not for Boston, as you might expect, but Los Angeles. In a role originally conceived for his BFF Matt Damon, Affleck plays Mark Kimball, an independent candidate running in the city's Mayoral race. So focussed on his political career is Mark that he has neglected his wife Abigail (Kerry Washington), and is oblivious to her affair with a teacher (Ray Fisher).
One evening Mark receives an anonymous phone call from a man claiming to have kidnapped his young son Danny. Mark thinks it's a distasteful prank until the caller sends a photo of the boy in captivity (as we'll soon see, this is the film's biggest plot hole). A ransom of $7 million is demanded, which forces Mark to confess to his wife that he has splurged all of their savings on his campaign costs. Mark's campaign runner Sam (Steven Yeun) steps up with a solution: he knows a fixer who specialises in such sensitive scenarios. Enter Gillian Anderson as Dayle, looking like Sharon Stone and sounding like Maggie Thatcher. Dayle can get her hands on the money Mark and Abigail need, but she comes at a high price, charging interest of $1.4 million. But what choice do these parents have?
If you've seen Kurosawa's film or either of its recent remakes, you know where the plot goes next (which makes the kidnapper's ability to send Mark a photo of Danny a head scratcher which the movie never addresses). It's by far the least interesting version of this story, as Affleck and co-screenwriters Connor O. McIntyre and Billy Ray fail to mine tension and suspense from what should be a pliable source. The movie is more interested in the conflict in Mark and Abigail's marriage than in whether a little boy lives or dies. For this to work, Mark and Abigail would need to be a lot more interesting than the thinly sketched characters we get here. Mark is a stock politician but the film is too cowardly to assign him to any side of the political fence, while Abigail has no personality and seems to change her mind on any given issue purely for the convenience of the plotting. Affleck and Washington are competent performers, but they can't make these characters worth caring about.
More interesting is Yeun as Mark's campaign chief. As we saw in his breakout big screen performance in the Korean thriller Burning, Yeun is very good at essaying weaselly types who may not be trustworthy, and he channels that same energy into Sam, whose primary concern is ensuring this incident doesn't derail Mark's political career. Anderson is fun as the vampy Brit fixer, but her character seems to have stepped in from a trashier and more entertaining version of this story. Elsewhere we have a couple of crude Mexican stereotypes in Mark and Abigail's housekeeper Cecilia (Adriana Paz) and her boyfriend Ramon (Luis Gerardo Méndez). Given where the plot goes, a better take on this setup might have made Cecilia and Ramon the central characters rather than Mark and Abigail.
As an actor turned director, Affleck is almost on the Clint Eastwood level. He has an under-appreciated knack for pulpy storytelling that allowed him to make a story about footwear marketing a gripping watch. But save for the spot-on fake campaign commercial that introduces us to Mark, Affleck's direction here is flat and devoid of energy. The most dramatic moment in the whole movie sees Mark struggle to climb down a not especially steep embankment.
The script is similarly unengaging. It's baffling how little interest the film has in the identity of the kidnappers, failing to create any of the paranoia that would no doubt surround a public figure in this scenario. The movie doesn't bother setting up any potential suspects, though Yeun appears to take it upon himself to make his character just shifty enough to ask questions regarding Sam's loyalty. Affleck gives us a ripe setup and allows it to go rotten over the course of 100 minutes.
Animals is on Netflix from October 9th.
