Rating : 🍅 (0/5)
Genre: Action
Year: 2023
Running time: 3 hours 10 minutes
Director: Sandeep Reddy Venga
Cast: Ranbir Kapoor, Anil Kapoor, Rashmika Manadana
Kid rating: A
Animal gives me Kabir Singh vibes, but in comparison to Animal, Kabir Singh is a pleasant walk in the park. In comparison to Animal’s Vijay, Kabir Singh’s Kabir seems like a normal, sane person. Animal is a crazy of another level.
RannVijay Balbir Singh (Ranbir Kapoor), son of Indian’s richest tycoon Balbir Singh (Anil Kapoor), hero-worships his father. The adulation is toxic; RannVijay can sacrifice anything to win Dad’s approval. Meanwhile the father has no time for him, so per Bollywood rules, Vijay morphs into a entitled, violent criminal pining away for Daddy’s love.
At the first sign of violent crime, he’s packed away to boarding school, and then later the US. He returns 8 years later, when there’s an attempt on his father’s life. Convinced that there will be more attacks, he musters an armed task force and engages in a full-out bloody war.
That’s the gist of it. While the story holds for the first hour or so (of this overlong gore-fest) the film soon devolves into a mish-mash of fight sequences without a coherent plot.
Animal exists in a man-verse (like Kabir Singh, Jersey etc.) where poor little boys traumatized by neglectful parents, cruel society etc. grow up to be entitled brats with guns, money and machismo, and they take, pillage and kill, while families, police and governments look on.
RannVijay is a feral animal, and so is his arch nemesis (Bobby Deol). While technically RannVijay is the hero, you can’t think actually think of him as one, because he so clearly needs psychiatric help. It’s like watching The Joker where you know the guy is out of his mind and you follow his antics clinically, uninvested and uncaring.
The film is Ranbir’s and he gives it his all. Everyone else drifts in and out of his frames. The women in the film are there to provide food, housekeeping services, sex and to be put down, slapped around, raped and degraded. It is aggressive misogyny; while Bollywood is not quite the gold standard in it’s depiction of women, I haven’t seen any other Hindi film treat its female characters with such casual disregard, like they weren’t even human.
Animal has got to be the most violent Hindi film I’ve ever seen. It is also one of the vulgarest. One is sadly used to the David-Dhawan-esque brand of vulgarity and double entendres, and cuss words, but Animal takes it up (or down) a few notches, with extremely distasteful and degrading dialogs.
On the pro side, the film did have good music and the fight sequences were choreographed well – almost like music videos. And of course the acting was pretty good – Ranbir was stellar, Anil Kapoor and Rashmika Mandana (who was so very inconsequential in Mission Majnu) were great.
That’s still not enough to spend 3 hours on this film though. Highly de-recommend.
Kidwise: Extremely unsuitable for kids; graphic, bloody violence, vulgarity and abuse towards women.
