Ben Affleck's Animals Lands on Netflix at 43 Percent. Critics Call It an Uncredited Kurosawa Riff, and Affleck Won't Say Where He Used AI.

Ben Affleck directed five movies before today. Four of them scored above 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and one of them won Best Picture. His sixth, Animals, arrived on Netflix and in select theaters today, and as of Friday morning it holds 43 percent across 23 reviews, with an average rating of 5.4 out of 10. Metacritic has it at 31 from 11 critics, which it labels generally unfavorable.

The numbers will move, but the shape is clear: a stacked cast, one performance everybody loves, a plot critics say came from somewhere else, and a director who admits he used AI on it without saying where. Here is what the reviews say, and whether it is worth 106 minutes of your weekend.

The setup, without spoilers

Affleck plays Mark Kimball, an independent candidate for mayor of Los Angeles who is trailing the incumbent and has mortgaged his house to pay for ads. Kerry Washington plays his wife, Abigail, a therapist with secrets of her own. On Halloween night their son Denny is kidnapped and the kidnappers demand $7 million, at a moment when most of the Kimballs' money has gone into the campaign. So they call Dayle Burton (Gillian Anderson), a fixer who can front the ransom for a price. Steven Yeun, Adriana Paz, Luis Gerardo Méndez, and Ray Fisher fill out the cast.

It was not supposed to be an Affleck performance. Netflix announced the project in January 2024 with Affleck directing and Matt Damon starring. By the time cameras rolled in Los Angeles in March 2025, Damon was committed to Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, now Universal's biggest movie ever, so Affleck cast himself. Damon stayed on as a producer. The script is credited to Connor O. McIntyre, Billy Ray (Captain Phillips), and Affleck. It is rated R for language throughout, some violence, and sexual references.

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What critics are saying

The most common complaint is that Animals wants to be a marriage drama, a political thriller, and a class story at once. Deadline's Pete Hammond wrote that Affleck seems to be "throwing too much at the wall to see what sticks." Collider found "too many competing ideas." Jeannette Catsoulis of The New York Times was harsher: "Like an inedible gruel made with top-shelf ingredients, Ben Affleck's Animals whisks its high-value cast into an overwrought script to produce an extraordinarily flat political thriller."

Jake Coyle of the Associated Press gave it two stars out of four and put the disappointment in context: "Affleck is a savvy and thoughtful filmmaker who can deftly weave human stories, genre mechanics and social issues together. But Animals feels narratively underpowered and melodramatically forced."

It has defenders. The Financial Times gave it four stars out of five, FandomWire called it "a tightly wound, aggressive, and ruthless political crime thriller," and Variety headlined its review a "nasty, compulsive kidnapping thriller." The middle ground belongs to David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter, who wrote that as "a movie to have on in the background while making dinner," it "will play just fine on Netflix."

The one thing nearly everyone likes: Gillian Anderson

Positive and negative reviews alike stop to praise Anderson's fixer, an "extremely high-end ice-queen fixer in a slinky white suit," in Rooney's words. The Financial Times called her "splendidly glacial," and SlashFilm's Chris Evangelista wrote that she is "the best of the bunch." Hammond also gave a shout-out to editors William Goldenberg, who won an Oscar for cutting Argo, and Christopher Rouse for keeping it "moving like a freight train." Yeun gets the short end: several reviews say the movie gives him very little to do.

The Kurosawa question

A rich man who has bet everything on one deal, a kidnapped child, and a ransom that would ruin him: critics at the AP, Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, and SlashFilm all read Animals as a loose remake of Akira Kurosawa's 1963 classic High and Low, itself adapted from Ed McBain's novel King's Ransom. As Coyle put it, Affleck "has transferred High and Low to Los Angeles and politics."

The problem is that the movie does not say so. Rooney called it "baffling that a movie so transparently indebted to it makes no acknowledgment of the inspiration," and Hammond reported that "there is no mention of either film in the press notes." The timing makes it stranger. Spike Lee already moved the same story to New York's music business in Highest 2 Lowest last year, with Denzel Washington, and that one carried its source on its sleeve. It sits at 83 percent. Kurosawa's original sits at 97.

The AI Affleck won't point to

At a Bloomberg event about a week before release, Affleck said he "used [AI] for lots of things in that movie," mostly in post-production, and called Animals a good example because "it's a very human movie." He declined to say which shots, explaining that his business is "trying to foster the illusion of reality."

Affleck founded InterPositive, a company that builds AI tools for post-production, in 2022. Netflix announced it had acquired the company in March, and Affleck stayed on as a senior adviser. Critics noticed: SlashFilm said the admission cast a shadow over the movie, and the AP noted it is hard to tell where.

Where Animals ranks among Affleck's films as a director

By Rotten Tomatoes score, as of October 9:

1. Argo (2012): 96 percent
2. Gone Baby Gone (2007): 94 percent
3. Air (2023): 93 percent
4. The Town (2010): 92 percent
5. Animals (2026): 43 percent
6. Live by Night (2016): 34 percent

It is also his second Netflix crime thriller of 2026. In January he starred opposite Damon, and Yeun, in Joe Carnahan's The Rip, which landed at 77 percent and Certified Fresh. One critic at the Midwest Film Journal could not resist calling Animals "the latest installment of the Ben Affleck Lugs Large Duffles of Money Around on Netflix Cinematic Universe."

Should you watch it?

If you already pay for Netflix, the bar is low, and even several negative reviews concede the cast keeps it watchable. Watch it for Anderson, and expect a Friday-night streamer, not The Town.

If the premise is what grabs you, though, watch High and Low first. It is the movie every review of Animals keeps reaching for, and it still plays like a vise 63 years later. For more options this weekend, including the movie critics actually love, see our weekend guide.

Then settle it yourself: add Animals to Shortlist, rank it head to head against Argo, The Town, and Gone Baby Gone, and see whether it clears Live by Night. Our movie tier list guide shows how to build the list and share it.

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