He is the man with no name. He doesn’t really need one. Content to live in the shadow of his father but wanting to step out of it so that he is seen at least once by the man, there is a constant restlessness that defines every fibre of his being. He is obsessed with his father — a deep longing for attention and love during childhood translating into an unhealthy, demonic character streak as an adult. Animal likes to play its protagonist — or antagonist, depending on which side of the Sandeep Reddy Vanga divide you are on — for both snigger and shock value, but, this is a one-line idea stretched interminably and padded up with extreme violence, sensationalist behaviour and misogyny. And it is brutal, in more ways than one.
Animal’s central premise of a tenuous filial relationship is used as a backdrop to paint a picture of a man unhinged who is willing to go to any length to avenge those who attacked his father. Balbir Singh (Anil Kapoor) — described as “India’s richest man” — escapes the assassination attempt, but that sets off his once estranged son — who only calls himself “Balbir Singh ka beta” — on a self-destructive path that brings in its wake grisly violence, depraved attitude and action and 203 minutes of a film that you may like or loathe, but one that will be critiqued and discussed in the days and weeks to come.
Animal may be called bold, intense, hatke, never-seen-before on the Indian screen, pushes the envelope, refuses to play it safe, et al. I agree with all of that to a great extent. What I will not agree with is Animal being called a good film. There will be many who will. The majority of them will be the same ones who clapped and cheered several times over in Arjun Reddy and Kabir Singh — both made by Vanga and imbued with misogyny, male entitlement and toxic masculinity — and powered them to blockbuster success.
Some may argue that this is an action thriller and its relentless violence, both physical and verbal, as well as the deviant worldview of its protagonist is a genre prerequisite. Animal is definitely built in the best tradition of South Korean films in this genre — Oldboy being the big daddy of them all — but the predilection to justify it all in the name of the demand of the genre just doesn’t cut it.
Ranbir Kapoor wholeheartedly embraces the man with no name, who we are told, just before the interval, is called Ranvijay. We are made to believe that Ranvijay — or Vijay as he is called — has had a troubled childhood. But there is no abusive father, life spent in penury or years spent locked away in a mental facility. His angst — and also his obsession — stems from the fact that his dad, who he referred to as his “superhero”, didn’t make enough time to spend with him. He was sent to a hostel and spent years away from his family. By that logic, Ishaan Awasthy of Taare Zameen Par should have been slicing and dicing his parents by the time he entered his teens.
In Animal, that translates into, well, an ‘animal’. Well into his mid-30s and a father of two kids himself, Vijay continues to be obsessed with his father but it is far from Oedipal. In fact, it is difficult to describe the equation between father and son, especially when Anil Kapoor’s Balbir remains a more or less passive bystander in the proceedings, every once in a while piping in to say: “Hamara beta criminal hain.”
Vanga wants his style of film-making to be called avant-garde and under that pretext fills his films with everything that he hopes will earn him the ‘boldness’ tag. And so our ‘hero’ holds a gun to his wife’s head when she berates him after he sleeps with another woman. He roughs up a woman during sex and then orders a luxury car in the “exact same shade” as the bruises. He butchers with an axe, dismembers with a dagger and carries a gun even to a classroom, an action that a section of the crowd in my audi actually cheered.
Animal sets many a dangerous precedent, and passes them off as the character trait of a flawed protagonist. And because one needs to show this man as extreme, there are shots of him parading naked in the garden in front of his family, discussing his overactive sex life in public with his wife Geetanjali (Rashmika Mandanna) as a mute spectator, and repeating phallic references. With Vanga also doing the writing and editing, the film chooses to describe Vijay as an “alpha male” more than once. At one point, he passingly refers to himself as a “ticking time-bomb”.
Animal is precisely that. It is a ticking time-bomb of a movie in which you don’t know what our protagonist will be up to next. And yet in the second half, there are long passages of absolute nothingness devoted to showing Vijay unraveling, which could have easily been reduced to a scene or two. The film is also Kabir Singh redux with Vijay roughing up Geetanjali and then making amends by applying medicine on her wounds.
Animal stretches to breaking point, hinging on a sole idea, with Ranbir being the only one powering it through. It’s a remarkably physically and emotionally owned performance but you don’t feel for the character. Bobby Deol is reduced to a footnote with a role both sketchy and short. The only bits that arrested our attention was the outstandingly done interval block, where Vijay fires gleefully from a bazooka in comic-book action style, with its exemplary background score, and the brutal but intriguing post-credits scene. Animal should have ended at the interval, followed by the post-credits.
I liked/ didn’t like Animal because... Tell t2@abp.in
