⭐⭐Rating: 1.5 out of 4.
Ben Affleck made it in Hollywood as an actor and Oscar-winning screenwriter, then proved to be a more-than-reliable filmmaker, with credits including “Gone Baby Gone,” “The Town” and the true-story espionage thriller “Argo” (2012), which won the Oscar for Best Picture. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for “Animals,” the new political crime drama that Affleck directs and stars in. It’s a maddening meander of divergent screenwriting ideas that never coalesce, with dialogue in places so banal and inert it might get an F in a screenwriting 101 class. It also wastes the talents of an impressive cast that includes Kerry Washington, Steven Yeun and Gillian Anderson.
Affleck stars as Mark Kimball, who is running to unseat the mayor of Los Angeles. He’s a former Marine from a working-class family who has become a lawyer and political activist. He’s also in an interracial marriage (Washington in a thankless, screeching part). And he has secrets, like using undocumented workers, that threaten to come out when his biracial son (Christopher Woodley) is kidnapped on Halloween while trick-or-treating with the Kimball’s nanny Cecilia (Adriana Paz), her undocumented boyfriend Ramon (Luis Gerardo Méndez) and their son.
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