Ben Affleck returns to the director’s chair for Animals (now on Netflix), a suspenseful thriller in which he stars as a Los Angeles mayoral candidate entangled in a kidnapping plot. Behind the film is a fascinating making-of story: Affleck had originally cast old buddy Matt Damon to star, with Affleck’s real-life ex, Jennifer Garner, co-starring. But plot similarities to Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest – itself an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low – temporarily derailed the production. Damon departed to film The Odyssey, and Affleck had a good think on it, then cast himself as the lead, replacing Garner with Kerry Washington, thus avoiding the awkwardness of playing Garner’s on-screen husband. Is this a more compelling story than what ended up on screen? Um, yeah, kind of.

ANIMALS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: Mark Kimball is an independent, funding his own mayoral campaign. He’s rich enough to do it, but only just – he’s a lawyer who inherited dough from his father, and as the polls show him a few points behind the incumbent, his campaign manager Sam (Steven Yeun) prompts him to mortgage the multimillion-dollar home he shares with his psychotherapist wife Abigail (Washington) and their tween son Denny (Christopher Woodley). Abigail isn’t aware of this development. Nor is Mark aware that she’s been having an affair. It’s Halloween, and with very few days left in the race, in regards to his professional and personal lives, Mark’s sitting on an atomic bomb, waiting for it to go off.  

Such is the spider’s egg sac of the plot at this point. Here’s where it hatches and all the little baby spiders begin scampering everywhere: The Kimballs employ Cecilia (Adriana Paz) as a housekeeper, but not her boyfriend Ramon (Luis Gerardo Mendez), because he’s in the country illegally. Ramon’s son and Denny go trick-or-treating, and while they’re out, Mark and Abigail have the I-can’t-believe-you-mortgaged-the-house argument – which is interrupted by a phone call from a cloaked-voice creep who claims to have kidnapped Denny, and demands a $7 million ransom. 

Sam Sam the Damage Control Man thus calls in Dayle Burton (Gillian Anderson), a boxcutter of a human being, to help resolve the situation quietly, since calling the cops would endanger Ramon, and the optics would torpedo Mark’s campaign, which hinges on the Latino vote. Dayle will loan Mark the money for a tidy fee, tell him what to say to the kidnapper, and do some other things if he so desires. Where’d she come from? The ethical gray areas, it seems.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Animals is Highest 2 Lowest meets Ransom in a Trumpish America.

Performance Worth Watching: Anderson is ice cold as the shadowy fixer, and seems to be enjoying every vampy moment of it.

Sex And Skin: One non-graphic scene of schtuppery.

Our Take: Animals isn’t sure whether it should be an issues-based thriller or a slab of juicy plot-driven pulp. Affleck – co-scripting with Connor O. McIntyre and Billy Ray – seemingly aims for the former, and wants us to take the story’s moral quandaries seriously, layering it with thorny modern-day politics. But thematically and narratively, it’s the equivalent of a train-plane-helicopter-boat-hovercraft-tank-blimp collision. To say it becomes a bit much is to underplay exactly how much is a bit much. It’s a bit way too much, and Affleck seems to have been squashed by his own ambition.

But even that isn’t what ultimately sinks Animals; skilled directors have executed more complicated screenplays, and Affleck, who made Argo and The Town exhilarating exercises in tension, should be among them. Despite the screenplay’s myriad contrivances, Anderson’s tonally discordant take on the material, a saggy second act, and the uninspired visual approach (Affleck relentlessly moves the camera around and around arguing characters, seemingly to play on the idea of political “spin”), it’s still mostly watchable – until the ending, which trips over itself a dozen times in an attempt to untangle and explain and illustrate ideas about moral compromise. Is the screenplay under- or overwritten? Hard to tell. But its lack of clarity renders it Affleck’s least satisfying directorial effort.

Our Call: We expect better from Affleck. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.