Animal Reviews

As soon as the audience sees Netflix labeled as a streaming partner in Animal's opening logos, some may question why a film running an interminable 3 hours and 12 minutes didn't forgo the theatrical release altogether in favor of expanding it into a series. An optimist might assume director Sandeep Reddy Vanga (Kabir Singh, Arjun Reddy) chose a feature-length medium for the sake of maintaining a tighter narrative. The optimist would be wrong. To the movie's credit, Animal tries to tell a fairly ambitious story for what might have otherwise been a simple genre film. The movie's elevator synopsis is simply that a brash and somewhat misogynistic man named Vijay (Ranbir Kapoor) must avenge an attack against his father (Anil Kapoor) at the hands of mysterious rival Abrar (Bobby Deol). This would be a rather straightforward premise in nearly any other action movie, but Animal is a film that takes nearly an hour to even set up its title card. At the onset, this may seem promising, as it hints at a movie with several layers. Unfortunately, very few of these layers enhance the film thematically enough to qualify as much more than distractions. In the hour leading up to the title drop, viewers watch as Vijay seduces a woman at her own engagement party, gets ousted from his father's birthday party over an argument about the family steel mill, fires an AK-47 at a classroom full of students, has sex on the floor of a private plane, gets married, and murders a man in a roomful of people. If the inclusion of that classroom scene makes it sound as if these events might be chronologically out of order, it's because they are. Vanga swings wildly from one timeline to another on several occasions, usually without narrative explanation or thematic reasoning. Although Vijay's appearance changes drastically enough to keep this muddled timeline from ever becoming confusing, it still gives the film a disjointed feel. It's never quite clear why an event is being shown at a particular moment, leaving the film's whiplashed viewers in suspense as to whether Vanga is truly unraveling a deeper narrative or simply wasting time. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the scenes involving Geeta (Rashmika Mandanna), the object of Vijay's seduction. Next to Ranbir and Deol, Mandanna delivers one of the best performances in the film. The audience, however, will likely glaze over this fact because almost nothing she does carries any real consequence. Other than one glorious example of silent expression in which Mandanna skillfully portrays Geeta's mixed fear and excitement over flying a plane for the first time, she largely serves as a mere sounding board for Vijay's unraveling psychosis.Most of the film's emotional sequences act as nothing more than filler to set up the revenge plot. Vijay's angst over being raised by an emotionally unavailable father seems at first to be a major theme in the film. This relationship is quite informative as it pertains to the opening sequences, and it's mirrored by the villain's hangups about his own father. Even so, most of the scenes involving this aspect of the narrative could easily be cut in half without losing any weight. Instead, they drag on endlessly, feeling less like an artful exploration of theme and more like padding to mask the film's lack of real depth. The only real emotional payoff is in the denouement, a structuring device not employed nearly enough by action films. Yet even with the immense amount of time it takes to get there, it still manages to feel largely unearned.Fortunately, the action and production choices are inarguably superb. Vijay's final battle with Abrar is everything a climax should be, and hardly a scene goes by in which the score and camera angles aren't selected with peak precision. For viewers who prioritize visuals over story, Animal is breathtakingly well-crafted cinema. Had Vanga more adeptly embraced his supplemental roles as editor and cowriter, he could have tightened the run time while still doing justice to the supporting characters. Instead, he's settled for rendering his visual masterpiece an infuriatingly mediocre exercise in storytelling.