A kidnapping thriller, a mayoral race, and the AI controversy nobody saw coming.

Welcome back to the C WEB podcast. Ben Affleck has returned to the director’s chair with Animals, a crime thriller that has landed on Netflix with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer wrapped in a silk scarf.

The premise is straightforward enough. Affleck plays Mark Kimball, an independent candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. He is a man of principle, or so we are told, running on a platform of honesty and reform. He has poured his family fortune into a campaign that is, by any reasonable measure, doomed. Then, in the final stretch, his teenage son is kidnapped. What follows is a descent into the moral mire, as Kimball and his wife Abby, a therapist played by Kerry Washington, are forced to navigate deception, ransom demands, and ugly choices that test everything they claim to believe.

The cast is formidable. Alongside Affleck and Washington are Gillian Anderson as a shady operator of indeterminate loyalties, Steven Yeun as Kimball’s campaign manager, and supporting turns from Adriana Paz, Ray Fisher, Matt Gerald, and Luis Gerardo Méndez. The film runs for roughly one hour and forty-eight minutes and carries an R rating, a detail that promises adult complexity the final product does not quite deliver.

Critical reception has been mixed. The Guardian described Animals as dull, a listless Los Angeles-set crime thriller that feels surprisingly anonymous and very similar to many other, better films. ScreenRant called it a boring mess and far from Affleck’s finest work. The Hollywood Reporter noted a thriller full of juicy elements that should be a lot tastier — a verdict that captures the central frustration: all the ingredients are there, but the dish arrives undercooked.

There is a curious footnote. Animals is a contemporary reworking of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 crime drama High and Low, a film many consider a masterpiece of moral suspense. The comparison is not flattering. Where Kurosawa’s original was a surgical examination of class, guilt, and complicity, Affleck’s version has been described as overwrought, wonky, and disposable pulp. Pedigree is no guarantee of quality, and a great premise can be undone by execution.

But the most peculiar aspect of Animals is not its reviews. It is the controversy that preceded its release. In a recent interview, Affleck revealed that he had used artificial intelligence during the making of the film for lots of things.

One might ask why this matters. It matters because Animals is not merely a film. It is a case study in the anxieties of contemporary Hollywood: made by a director who has been both celebrated and derided, released by a streaming giant that has reshaped the industry’s economics, and promoted in an environment where the use of AI is no longer a technical footnote but a moral flashpoint. The film’s failure to cohere is, in a sense, a reflection of the industry’s own incoherence.

The cynical reading is that Animals is a forgettable thriller that will be consumed, digested, and discarded within a week. The more generous reading is that it tries to say something about ambition, integrity, and the compromises we make when the stakes are high — and simply fails to say it well. Affleck plays a man who has spent his fortune on a campaign built on principle, only to discover that principle is a luxury he cannot afford when his son’s life is on the line. It is a rich premise. It is a shame the film does not trust it.

The elephant in the room is not just the AI controversy. It is the sense that everyone involved has done this before, and done it better.

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