Ben Affleck's 'Animals' Review: His First Real Misfire Behind the Camera

LOS ANGELES — The first rule of a Ben Affleck crime thriller has always been simple: trust the ingredients. The guy who directed Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and Argo — three certified-fresh crime pictures in a row, plus the crowd-pleaser Air — has earned the benefit of the doubt a few times over. So when Animals lined up Affleck directing himself, Kerry Washington, Gillian Anderson, Steven Yeun, a script co-written by Billy Ray (Captain Phillips), and Robert Elswit behind the camera, it looked like a lock. The embargo lifted this week and the critics' verdict landed hard: 39% on Rotten Tomatoes, 31 on Metacritic — "generally unfavorable," in Metacritic's words. The one Affleck misfire before this was Live by Night a decade ago. Now it has company.

And honestly? Having read through the critical wreckage, the score is about right. Not because Animals is a disaster — it isn't, quite — but because it takes one of the most stacked casts in any Netflix original this year and hands them a movie that keeps stalling in the one place it can't afford to: the story.

The setup works

The premise is a clean hook with no spoilers needed: Mark Kimball (Affleck), a Los Angeles mayoral candidate, has his son Denny kidnapped in the final stretch of the campaign. He and his wife Abigail (Washington) have hours to come up with a ransom payment — but most of their money is tied up in the campaign, so they have to get their hands dirty and expose parts of their lives that were never meant to see daylight. It's a pressure cooker with a political spine, and on paper it's the kind of machine Affleck builds well: desperate people, compromised morals, a clock running down.

What works: the cast is doing real work

Nearly every critic who took a swing at this film drew a bright line between the cast and the script. The Financial Times praised Kerry Washington and Gillian Anderson. Tom's Guide singled out Washington and Anderson as the performances that stand out in a film it called a "respectable crime thriller" with pedestrian plotting. FandomWire went further, calling Affleck's turn as the desperate, cornered Kimball his best performance since Gone Girl — a powder keg of rage, inadequacy, and humiliation — while dinging the film's overly tidy ending. The Times landed at three stars, calling it knotty, nasty fun and, in the final analysis, a guilty pleasure: the kidnapping story never fully makes sense, but Affleck is too good a filmmaker to produce a genuine misfire.

That's the recurring theme across the friendlier reviews: there is talent up there fighting for this movie. Steven Yeun, Gillian Anderson, Adriana Paz, Luis Gerardo Méndez, Ray Fisher — that is an absurd bench, and the screen time that lets them work is the film's best material. Elswit shoots Los Angeles with his usual grit-and-glow, and the Artists Equity production has the expensive, lived-in look of a movie made by people who know what a crime thriller should feel like.

What doesn't: the story keeps slipping the leash

The problem, as the harsher reviews put it, is everything else. The Daily Beast's Nick Schager dismissed the thriller as an unoriginal story that lacked energy and suspense. MovieWeb, tracking the Rotten Tomatoes debut, noted that the film has all the ingredients of a classic gritty Affleck crime drama but is "severely lacking in bite." The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney summed up the whole enterprise in his headline: a thriller full of juicy elements that should be a lot tastier.

The consensus complaints repeat across outlets: the plotting is pedestrian, the conspiracy mechanics never fully cohere, and when the finale arrives, the film swerves into silliness rather than earning its tension. It's the oldest problem in the kidnap-thriller playbook — the script needs the characters to be smart in some scenes and reckless in others, and Animals never smooths over the seams. For a filmmaker whose reputation was built on airtight clockwork plots, that's the cut that bleeds the most.

The long, messy road to the screen

Some context, because the behind-the-scenes story here is almost more dramatic than the film. Animals was announced in January 2024 as the next Affleck-Matt Damon crime collaboration, with Damon set to star and Jennifer Garner in talks to co-star. Affleck got cold feet and delayed filming in early 2024; the project reignited in February 2025 with Damon out — he'd committed to The Odyssey — and Affleck stepping into the lead role himself. Garner exited too, with Affleck saying bluntly that casting his ex-wife would bring the audience's baggage to work against the movie. Kerry Washington came aboard in her place. Principal photography finally started in Los Angeles on March 7, 2025.

You can feel that history in the finished film: a project that spent two years being recast and rethought, then got made fast. Sometimes that chaos produces something electric. Here it produced a movie that looks like an Affleck thriller, sounds like an Affleck thriller, and never quite thinks like one.

"Full of juicy elements that should be a lot tastier." — David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter, on Animals

Should you watch it?

Here's the honest math. If you're an Affleck completist, a Kerry Washington fan, or someone who genuinely enjoys a Friday-night thriller with good actors chewing on mediocre material — The Times' "guilty pleasure" take — you'll probably have a decent time. The 106 minutes move, the cast never phones it in, and it costs you nothing if you already pay for Netflix. If you're expecting the next Gone Baby Gone, recalibrate immediately. This is closer to Live by Night: a handsome, well-cast movie that never finds the gear it needs.

For more on the film's release, check out our primer on what to know about Animals and our report on Affleck's use of AI in the film's production. Last week's Movie of the Week was Tyler Perry's Doing Life.

For more on what's streaming, check out our movies hub and the latest entertainment news. Animals is now streaming on Netflix.