Disclaimer: There might be some spoilers ahead!
Animal, directed by Sandeep Reddy Vanga, and starring Ranbir Kapoor, Anil Kapoor, Bobby Deol, and Rashmika Mandanna in prominent roles alongside others, released in theatres world-wide on 1st December, clashing with Sam Bahadur. It is majorly an action thriller cum drama film with violence, crime, and sex as its main themes. The film is cinematically brilliant but lacks a heart and a soul. It is a mass action entertainer but lacks purpose and emotion.
With a runtime of approximately 203 minutes, this film has emerged as one of the most polarising films of the decade, with people dividing into groups to shower equal measures of love or hatred on the film. The film has sparked opinionated discussions and conversations about its several toxic and misogynistic aspects. Roaring in cinemas (and how!), Animal has redefined the meaning of commercial success and has created a wild tsunami at the global box-office!
Animal is a gory bloodbath but is engaging and promises to keep the audience hooked till the very end! Despite being one of the longest films made in Hindi cinema, Animal proves that the duration is not a disadvantage. The film features some of the best action sequences to have been made in the history of Hindi cinema. The first half of the movie is well-paced and gripping. The second half feels slower and could have been shortened. The film has an impactful and heart-thumping background score, with beautiful songs that complement the scenes fittingly.
Most of all, the film boasts of top-notch acting performances. All the actors have portrayed their roles effortlessly on screen, keeping it very real and raw. Ranbir Kapoor plays a deranged character with utmost elan, and has possibly delivered the finest performance of his entire career. Bobby Deol impresses with his superb onscreen presence despite having limited screen space and time.
However, despite its positive points, Animal is, all in all, a very problematic film. It is violent. It is brutal. It is gory. It is destructive. It is unhinging. It is disturbing. It is hysterical. It is toxic. It is extreme, excessive, and irrational in everything that it wishes to deliver. It can be haunting for those who get easily triggered.
And most unfortunately, it is sexist and misogynistic. It is problematic in more than one way. Animal, with a baseless storyline that lacks gravity, manages to entertain with only violence and sexual references. Violence and sex are two such emotions which make people sensitive to provocation. Animal thematically uses these emotions as a bait to engage the audience. It heavily loads its paper-thin plot with guns and violence in order to sustain.
Animal emerges as an extremely radical movie that “glorifies” toxic masculinity. It “celebrates” toxic men, calling them “alpha” males. Every abusive or violent scene is accompanied by over-the-top background music to complement it. The female characters are poorly written and portrayed, and purely reflect the director’s ideology. If you think that Kabir Singh (2019) was synonymous with toxicity, sexism, abuse, and violence, Animal promises to prove you wrong by simply going overboard to deliver these very troubled themes.
If the slap was a problem in Kabir Singh; in Animal, you have Ranvijay Singh Balbir (Ranbir Kapoor) pulling out a rifle, shooting into the wall in the bedroom, and frightening the sleeping kids in the presence of his wife. After all, “It’s a man’s world, Geetanjali, deal with it”, says the badass son. The hero uses the theory of “poetry was developed by weaker men in an attempt to get back their lost women from the alpha males” to woo his love interest.
He uses a cheap pickup line which clearly objectifies a woman’s body, “You have a big pelvis, you can accommodate healthy babies”, to again, woo her. After all, the sole purpose of a woman is to give birth to babies. The hero threatens to openly abuse his wife, but later quietens her down when she gets angry by making her listen to a black-box recording of the first time they got physically involved with each other on his private jet.
The hero promises to never cheat on his wife, but does so for the sake of “protecting” his father and destroying his enemies. He makes another lady fall in love with her and uses her body and later, humiliates her in equal measure. In another instance, the hero defends how difficult he finds it to change his diapers every now and then as his urinary function has failed, by mocking his wife for having to change sanitary pads for four days in a month, only.
There’s also another bad guy who murders an individual at his own wedding, and then throws himself on his bride, and forces her to have sex with him, in public view, and in a pool of blood. There are several instances of violence and abuse against women and children in the film. There is, possibly, an instance of cannibalism too. In a twenty-to thirty-minute-long sequence loaded with high-octane action, there’s a machine-gun which was imagined, manufactured, and assembled in different parts of India, and the film calls this phenomenon an illustration of “Atma Nirbhar Bharat”.
Were you mad at Kabir for his violent ways and anger issues in Kabir Singh? Well, then, in Animal, you have an unhinged son who loves his father so much that he could do anything to protect him and hunt down his enemies, going to the extent of murdering hundreds of people in cold blood. The beauty of this film is how it manages to look entertaining despite being unnecessarily barbaric and vile, right from the very beginning. Even violence looks stylish in this film. The hero does what he wishes to, and says what he wishes to, and everything that he says he wants to do or does leads to a journey to nowhere.
His father’s absence throughout his childhood has made him thirsty for seeking validation. He wants to prove his love for his father. His father hates him because he has no real ambition in life, has not been a sufficiently responsible son, and is a “criminal since birth” in his eyes. Animal is supposedly all about an intimate father-son relationship, but where is the soul of the film? Does the film have a soul at all? Or does its soul get lost in its gunshots and bloody violence? The film is aimless and deviates from its purpose.
This article isn’t as much a review of Animal as it is a reminder of Animal’s problematic themes. If one takes masculinity to an extreme, a film like Animal may be born. If one takes femininity to an extreme, a film like Thank You For Coming (2023) may be born. Both are acceptable. Both exist in real life, anyway. Both are free to be shown on the big screen and in films. Both are fine to be shown to the audience.
However, it is noteworthy that cinema does have an impact on the minds of the spectators. Films shape and influence mindsets and ideologies. Films impact youngsters. (A sequel to Animal is being planned as well.) Thus, it almost emerges as a moral responsibility, at least to a certain extent, for filmmakers and actors to not showcase such radical concepts to the audience that might prove to be destructive or harmful towards society at large. That’s it. That’s the point of this article.
Animal is running very successfully in cinemas now. Watch it if you are curious or love action or wish to witness Ranbir Kapoor in an unabashedly heinous avatar, else wait for it to premiere on Netflix!