Animals

Ben Affleck directs and stars as Mark Kimball, an LA mayoral candidate whose son is grabbed by a kidnapper demanding seven million dollars. Kerry Washington plays his wife. Gillian Anderson and Steven Yeun fill out the ensemble. The script, co-written by Affleck with Billy Ray and Connor McIntyre, relocates the bones of Akira Kurosawa's 1963 "High and Low" to a modern Los Angeles election. The first act sets up the campaign, the family, the ransom call, and the moral trap at the center of the premise: whose kid is actually on the other end of the line, and what does a man running for office owe a stranger's child.

Yeun is doing real work here, calibrated and specific, and Anderson sharpens every scene she's in. The campaign-trail scaffolding gives the opening something concrete to climb. Robert Elswit shoots LA with the composure you'd expect from the guy who shot "There Will Be Blood," and the ransom sequence has one or two genuinely tense beats before the movie forgets what it's doing. Variety liked it. The Financial Times gave it four stars. If you want a competent-looking adult thriller to put on while folding laundry, it has adults, it has a thriller shape, and nobody's wearing a cape.

The screenplay. Everyone in it talks like they've already read the thinkpiece about the movie. Characters announce their class position, their marriage problems, and the moral stakes of the kidnapping out loud, in that order, usually in the same scene. Kurosawa staged this exact dilemma as a vise closing in silence. Affleck stages it as a panel discussion. Washington is stranded with reaction shots and nothing to react to. The campaign subplot keeps interrupting the thriller, and the thriller keeps interrupting the campaign subplot, and neither builds pressure. Roger Ebert's site gave it 1/4. THR called it an eye-rolling insult. The AI-assist chatter around the production didn't help, but the writing was going to be the problem either way.

If you liked "The Accountant 2" and "Hypnotic" and keep rooting for Affleck's director mode to come back, you'll find enough here to sit through. People who showed up because the Kurosawa comparison was in the marketing will be checking their phones by the forty-minute mark. Anyone who watched "Gone Baby Gone" or "The Town" expecting that filmmaker to show up again should pour a drink first.

SLOP, and it's a writing problem more than a directing one. The movie wants to be about wealth, race, and what a public man owes a private family, but it won't let drama carry those ideas. It makes the characters recite them. Scenes stop so the themes can be stated. The Kurosawa engine, which runs on silence and ethical compression, gets replaced with monologue. That's not sermonizing from one side or the other, it's sermonizing as a storytelling habit, and it flattens good actors into mouthpieces. Elegant cinematography can't rescue a script that keeps explaining itself. Scroll past it.