Movie Review: In Ben Affleck's 'Animals,' a kidnapping threatens a mayoral campaign

We have now gotten two remakes of Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low,” and yet not a single new rendition of “Stray Dog.”

Lamentable though that imbalance may be — you may have your own Kurosawa favorite — it’s not hard to see the contemporary appeal of 1963’s “High and Low.” It’s an ingenious plot. A wealthy businessperson believes his son has been taken by kidnappers. But they’ve mistakenly taken the wrong boy: his chauffeur’s son. Paying the ransom becomes an anguished moral dilemma, rife with socioeconomic tension.

Last year, Spike Lee moved the drama to New York and the music industry in “Highest 2 Lowest.” Now, in a new Netflix movie, Ben Affleck has transferred “High and Low” to Los Angeles and politics.

“Highest 2 Lowest” brought some lively scenes to the table: a rap battle between Denzel Washington and A$AP Rocky , a subway car full of Yankee fans shouting “Boston sucks!” It wasn’t nearly Lee’s best film but it was unmistakably a Lee film.

But Affleck, who directed, co-wrote and stars in “Animals,” never finds much of a pulse in his lackluster Kurosawa riff for Netflix.

In transferring the story to Los Angeles, Affleck, who wrote the script with Connor O. McIntyre and Billy Ray, opens the hostage story up to new thematic fronts — divorce, public persona, duplicity — that have meaningful reverberations for Affleck, a Hollywood A-lister who has navigated fluctuating opinion polls and much-publicized personal dramas for the better part of his career. Yet those parallels aren’t enough to enliven this far-from-wild “Animals,” an Affleck-directed movie well shy of his better “A”-titled films, “Argo” and “Air.”

The movie opens with political ad artifice. Mark Kimball (Affleck) is running for mayor of Los Angeles, and in the film’s glossy beginning, he earnestly pledges transparency. But once the opening credits have rolled in “Animals,” a less rosy reality sets in. As Mark smiles his way through campaign headquarters, his campaign manager Sam (Steven Yeun) tells him their big ad spend didn’t help enough. He’s still trailing the incumbent by four points.

Mark maintains his optimistic front, but inside his office, panic is setting in. To bankroll the ads, Mark has mortgaged his home. If he loses the election, Mark says, he’ll lose his house, and, soon after, his wife.

Like his political image, much is for show in Mark’s domestic life, too. His wife, Abigail (Kerry Washington), a psychologist, is cheating on him. Mark’s unaware but we can sense their relationship is largely a facade. Mark also runs on a pro-immigrant platform but when the couple’s housekeeper Cecilia (Adriana Paz) asks them to hire her undocumented immigrant husband Ramon (Luis Gerardo Méndez), they decline out of fear it could harm Mark’s campaign.

On Halloween night, Mark and Abigail’s son, Denny, is kidnapped. A phone call comes: $7 million to save him. For the well-off Kimballs, this would typically be solvable. Except because Mark has borrowed against everything they have, raising the money is more complicated. On Sam’s advice, they call in a mysterious crisis fixer, Dayle Burton (Gillian Anderson), who, we gather, will inevitably compromise Mark’s pledges against corruption.

From the start, it’s a crisis for both the kidnapped boy and Mark’s political campaign. Even in such a fraught moment, Mark is encouraged by his campaign manager to consider how things will appear. That’s doubly true when it turns out that the kidnappers have unwittingly taken not the Kimballs’ son but Cecilia and Ramon’s.

Affleck is a savvy and thoughtful filmmaker who can deftly weave human stories, genre mechanics and social issues together. But “Animals” feels narratively underpowered and melodramatically forced. It offers Affleck some good opportunities to flaunt his Spanish and comment on the false fronts that exist both in public officialdom and intimate relationships. But it doesn't come anywhere close to matching the propulsion of Kurosawa .

Affleck, who earlier this year sold an artificial intelligence company to Netflix for more than $500 million, has said he used AI in the making of “Animals.” It’s difficult to tell where. But the greater issue is that “Animals” generally appears flat and visually bland, lacking the human textures the story needs.

But before “Animals” loses its grip, Gillian Anderson casts a momentary spell over the film. In a brief, underwritten role, Anderson — sensational earlier this year in “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” — elevates the film. Even when handed ham-fisted dialogue like “Humans are animals that tell stories,” Anderson is queen of this “Animal” kingdom.

“Animals,” a Netflix release streaming Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for language throughout, some violence and sexual references. Running time: 106 minutes. Two stars out of four.