‘Animals’ Review: Ben Affleck’s Tedious New Netflix Thriller Is Quite Literally Just Bad TV

Ben Affleck gets to flex his well-honed Mexican Spanish, while Gillian Anderson goes full campy vamp, complete with a gelled-back blond mane, in Affleck’s otherwise tedious new Netflix thriller, “Animals.” The “Argo” and “The Town” director also stars in the underwritten (by three people, no less: Connor O. McIntyre, Billy Ray, and Affleck) film as a moneyed Los Angeles mayoral candidate who’s been borrowing against himself to fund a campaign that’s teetering on the edge of victory. But he needs just over two percent of the Latino vote to overtake the incumbent mayor — which is when a domestic kidnapping scandal presents a morally reprehensible but lucrative potential avenue. Despite perfunctory theatrical play in Netflix partner venues, “Animals” is a movie meant to live and die on the streaming platform, without the gloss of the streamer’s most insipid serial fare, but without any stylistic brio or creative vision to justify a big-screen presentation. It’s a tweener in the sense that it’s not a TV show, but it sure looks like a bad one. Nor is it a satisfying feature film, thanks to a pile-up of narrative improbabilities and typically talented performers let down by anemic writing that’s meant only to be shouted by attractive line readers onscreen. (Affleck questioned the “assembly line” nature of Netflix film productions a few years ago; Dan Lin must have a talent for persuasion, because this film sure looks like it was put together in a factory.) Blandly appealing, affable enough, and with the easy looks and charm that could lead any generic political campaign, Mark Kimball is just inches away from becoming mayor of Los Angeles. He’s got a gorgeous wife, Abigail (Kerry Washington), who’s also Black, so Mark gets extra points there in the image department for having a well-rounded, inclusive profile (and one the movie gestures to interrogate during a throwdown fight late therein). They have a young boy together, whose future looks bright. Their plushly appointed, multilevel home sits in the Hollywood Hills, many stories well above the street-level urban ruin, tent cities, and crime below. They also have a Mexican nanny, Cecilia (the great Adriana Paz, dismally wasted in a subservient victim role), whom they call and treat as family. She desperately wants Mark and Abigail to hire her boyfriend Ramon (Luis Gerardo Méndez), whose small son Cecilia has taken in as her own. But Ramon is undocumented, and as Abigail reminds her employee, her husband Mark is a law-abiding citizen, so he could never. It’s Halloween, and hopes, dreams, and endlessly sunny days are shot to shit when Mark receives a scrambled phone call demanding a $7 million ransom for the safe return of his son, whom Abigail has just sent out trick-or-treating with Ramon’s son. Is the caller bluffing? They haven’t shown proof of life, or even of a kidnapping. But backing up, “Animals” has already established multiple skeletons and secrets in the closet between Mark and Abigail that could make either one vulnerable to a targeted kidnapping operation. Abigail, for one, is having an affair with another man, who is Black — a particular detail that will drive the nail in on Mark even further later on — and who, too, seems to have money and status. During one of their assignations, Ron (Ray Fisher, here and gone like vapor) tells Abigail he loves her enough that he’d be content living in a one-bedroom apartment with her on La Brea. How horrible. But a line like that also fleshes out the head-in-the-stratosphere delusions of everyone here. Meanwhile, Mark has been taking out on his own home equity to fund his campaign, so not winning isn’t optional. His campaign manager, Sam (Steven Yeun), shares in Mark’s determination but is more ruthless: When the kidnapping victim turns out to be someone else’s son, Sam sees an opportunity to boost election numbers in Mark’s favor. Mark the good guy, Mark who loves his community. The Mark who speaks Spanish perfectly in a weirdly sexy Mexican accent to his groundskeeper. Enter the glamorous, mysterious crisis fixer Dayle (Anderson, whom I could watch read a phone book, or perhaps the most mundane X-File dossier ever known), who offers $7 million, plus a steep upfront fee, to make the problem go away and the child reappear. While Anderson seems to be having a hell of a time playing haughtily serious — but in the most unserious way — it’s a shame the triumvirate of screenwriters couldn’t come up with anything for her to do. Dayle has other, more sinister options on the table (or under her off-white power suit) for an additional charge. During an all-nighter of deliberation and telephone back-and-forth with the kidnapper, those options start to tempt Mark and Abigail as their marriage begins to unravel. It’s a bummer that the ChatGPT-adjacent storyline of “Animals,” the latest film from a guy who directed a fake film crew in fictionalized Tehran to intercept the Iranian hostage crisis, offers few surprises, twists, or narrative turns. That’s even all the way up to a vaguely well-paced sequence in an emptied-out Los Angeles River at dawn (and with a risibly laugh-worthy handoff moment). The movie was shot by Robert Elswit, the Oscar-winning cinematographer of “There Will Be Blood” and Netflix’s dazzling black-and-white noir “Ripley.” Or is it another guy named Robert Elswit? His visual signature is nowhere to be found here, nor is any visual signature at all. “Animals” is a string of shot-reverse-shots that consist of pure coverage, blocked and framed to fit a TV or phone screen for idle, listless viewing. For every piece of drone footage sweeping across LA, every shot that carves out about two feet of space between actors with no sizzle, I kept wishing for more Gillian Anderson, more Gillian Anderson, please. Grade: C- “Animals” opens in select theaters and starts streaming on Netflix on Friday, October 9.