Ben Affleck Goes for Broke in Netflix Kidnapping Caper

Netflix Ben Affleck is an accomplished filmmaker with a Best Picture winner (2012’s Argo ) to his name.

Yet you wouldn’t know it from Animals , a Netflix thriller (Oct.

9) that strives in vain to animate a familiar crime saga about a kidnapping gone awry.

The second remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 classic High and Low in the past fourteen months (following Spike Lee’s 2025 adaptation Highest 2 Lowest ), the actor/director’s latest behind-the-camera venture is an unoriginal and suspense-free tale of the haves and the have-nots, told with minimal flair, even less vigor, and almost no interest in its central complications.

Anyone interested in this story has better options—and, one would think, so does Affleck when it comes to available cinematic projects.

Mark Kimball (Affleck) is running as an independent for mayor of Los Angeles, and the de facto campaign video that opens Animals suggests he’s both a charmingly down-to-earth guy and, beneath the surface, a typically calculating politician who knows what appeals to the electorate.

This means he can’t hire Mexican ranch hand Ramon (Luis Gerardo Méndez), the boyfriend of his family’s nanny Ceci (Adriana Paz), because he’s an undocumented immigrant.

Nonetheless, he’s desperate to reach the Latino vote, and when he hears that he’s polling behind his opponents, he agrees to his campaign manager Sam’s (Steven Yeun) plan to raise additional money by taking out a loan against his sizeable inheritance.

Mark is married to Abby (Kerry Washington), who responds to his every word and action with thinly veiled disgust and exasperation, and Animals quickly reveals that she’s hiding a secret that, if it comes to light, would threaten their relationship—and his campaign.

Thus, the clan is on shaky ground when Mark and Abby’s son Denny (Christopher Woodley) goes out trick-or-treating with Ceci and Ramon’s boy Hector (Jacob Estrada), and shortly thereafter, Mark receives a phone call informing him that Denny has been snatched and the price for his return is $7 million in cash.

Since the kidnapper masks his voice and neither Mark nor Abby can identify anyone who’d have it out for them, they’re stuck in a quandary, made worse by Mark’s now-financially strapped situation: They no longer have the money to make the transaction.

Collaborating with celebrated cinematographer Robert Elswit (whom he previously worked with on The Town ), Affleck dramatizes the chaotic moment Mark and Abby learn of Denny’s abduction via a serpentine oner that follows them in and around their well-to-do home, capturing their fear and fury in prolonged real time.

Otherwise, though, the director relies on rather unremarkable compositions and multiple mediocre drone shots to generate pulse-pounding energy.