I’m going to let you in on a little secret: Somewhere in the catacombs beneath the Hollywood hills there’s a pit full of rotting videotapes. Each tape contains one of the countless forgotten made-for-tv remakes of one of the best movies ever made. It’s only there you can find the 1987 rehash of “Roman Holiday,” starring Catherine Oxenberg and Tom Conti, or the 1959 version of “The Philadelphia Story,” starring Christopher Plummer, Gig Young and Diana Lynn. This town was literally built on the bones of cheap retreads that never held a candle to the original, and there are so many that the foundation still holds strong.
It’s been a while since we tossed a new half-hearted made-for-tv remake into that dank, dark oubliette, so let’s all give thanks to Ben Affleck and Netflix for their ritualistic sacrifice. The kidnapping thriller “Animals” — starring Affleck, directed by Affleck, and co-written by Affleck — is a hacky, low-rent redo of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 classic “High and Low.” It doesn’t advertise this connection. Maybe they thought there was enough plausible deniability that they didn’t have to give Kurosawa a shout-out in the credits. Then again, that’s what Sergio Leone said when he turned “A Fistful of Dollars” into a nearly shot-for-shot remake of “Yojimbo,” and Kurosawa successfully sued to get the credit he deserved.
In any case, if you’ve seen “High and Low,” or if you’ve seen Spike Lee’s recent and genuinely ambitious remake “Highest 2 Lowest,” you know the set-up. If you haven’t, you’re the target demographic for “Animals.” Ben Affleck stars as Mark Kimball, a mayoral candidate in Los Angeles who’s down by four points. If wondering what his policies are, he’s running as an independent so Affleck doesn’t have to mention that.
Kimball is in debt up to his ears. His wife Abigail (Kerry Washington) is sleeping with another man. His housekeeper Cecilia (Adriana Paz) is begging him to hire her undocumented boyfriend, Ramon (Luis Gerardo Méndez). If that’s not enough suspects and red herrings, Kimball also has a sketchy campaign manager named Sam (Steven Yeun) and Abigail’s lover is played, briefly and distractingly, by Ray Fisher of “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” fame.
The fit hits the shan on Halloween, when Mark gets a mysterious phone call that says his son was kidnapped. The criminal wants $7 million dollars or he’ll kill the boy, but Mark doesn’t have that much money because he sank it all into the campaign without telling his wife. With zero options, Sam suggests calling a mysterious fixer, Dayle (Gillian Anderson), who handles off-the-books criminal shenanigans for the rich and powerful.
There’s a twist, and if you haven’t seen “High and Low” you may not see it coming. Then again, Affleck telegraphs the plot point harder than an “S.O.S.” from the Titanic, so maybe you will. In any case, the rest of the film plays out over that fateful night and difficult morning, while the Kimballs react to one moral quandary after another and watch their lives and marriage implode in slow-motion.
Critics like to call exciting movies “powder kegs” and technically “Animals” is no exception. But a powder keg doesn’t do anything unless someone lights a spark, and Affleck left his matches at home. The audience knows every secret that’s about to get revealed and every character reacts the way you’d expect them to. These people don’t reveal anything about themselves when their backs are against the wall. They just talk about what they’ve been up to and slide back into the status quo.
Gillian Anderson plays an ice queen, a surface-level badass who’s seen it all before, but if there’s a character beneath that calculating façade, Anderson didn’t find it. Then again, it’s not like there’s anything in this material that shows her the way.
Only Luis Gerardo Méndez — playing a man sucked into an unthinkable situation, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time — manages to pluck more than one note. In a smarter film, Ramon would have been the main character, since then, at least, “Animals” could have played itself off as a new twist on an old story, instead of a hapless copycat with a comparatively meaningless ending.
The damnedest thing is, “Animals” never had to be this listless. Netflix sometimes pours time and money into its original movies and sometimes they play like castoffs somebody filmed on the quick to meet a quota, but put the right actors in a stressful position and you can turn any story, at any scale, into a corker. Even if you’ve seen the story before. But you never get the sense that anyone was motivated to push the boundaries of this material and make it feel dangerous.
Ben Affleck says he used AI to make parts of “Animals” and unfortunately that tracks. There’s a lack of interest and care that permeates through every frame, as though only parts of this movie were actually worth making real. Which parts? I couldn’t say, since it all feels fake and redundant. “Animals” is cinematic table scraps, AI or no AI, and almost all of it is compostable.
“Animals” is now streaming, exclusively on Netflix.
