Animal: An afterthought

Date: 10^th Dec 2023

Time: 10 mins before noon

A storm of thoughts started to crumble upon the walls of my head, and that freaky post-credit scene only increased the intensity and frequency of the tides. You guessed it right! It’s “Animal” we are talking about and there is no one word to describe the movie and the reaction on the same.

To say the least, I can say one thing, “It is so problematic, that it becomes good in itself”. As the number of points to hit are many, I’ll keep it in bulleted form.

We’ll go from the good, the bad, and finally to the ugly part of it.

THE GOOD

I think we can say that a director has created a memorable film when we start to love lovable characters and hate the villainous characters. And here I think Sandeep Reddy Vanga has got it spot on with his portrayal of characters. We bloody hate the hell out of Ranbir’s character when he is doing monstrous things. This just gives a big thumbs up for the story, execution, and editing of the film.

In Hindi movies, the music is the catalyst in the process of liking a movie. And a big team of music directors have got it bang on with music and BGM, the themes for both Ranbir and Lord Bobby will stay in memory for a long time. This is the only reason why I watched Kabir Singh instead of Arjun Reddy even after being insisted on watching the latter by two or three close ones. The music and songs of Kabir Singh just hit different tones; it might be one of the top 5 best music albums of the last 10 years.

Last to say the sheer daring of Vanga and the cast who chose to be a part of such a film which attracted polarizing views. This shows how committed they all are to their craft.

THE BAD

The obvious elephant in the room is the effect of such glorification of violence on public perception. (*Spoiler alert*) In my opinion, the film has not justified the horrendous behavior of the protagonist by rewarding him at the end, anything that has happened is exactly the opposite of it. Depiction of police might have been done better, but the fact that the character is the richest man in India, such depiction might be understood.

In such situations our responsibility as viewers and cinephiles increases. Such films constantly try to test our conscience and if we sail through such storms, it makes us better humans with a stronger conscience. We just can’t lose such an opportunity.

THE UGLY

Ever since his first film Arjun Reddy, Vanga has been seen as a person disliked by film critics. Vanga also embraces the battles, rolls up his sleeve, and gets in a head-on fight with them. In doing so he gets involved in some over-the-top unnecessary action. It just felt for two scenes in the entire movie. It’s a director’s creative liberty to express his thoughts through his craft, but Vanga may need another way than such unnecessary action scenes.

For an Indian Hollywood audience, this film in no way contains any gore content that they have not seen in foreign films. John Wick and Deadpool have scenes with much more bloodshed. But for an average Indian viewer, it may be triggering a couple of places. Vanga has relied upon suggestive Gore scenes keeping explicit instances at minimal.

I know I missed upon the usual suspects, the point of female representation in the movie. I think it’s an issue as big as any other issue, but it would be highly contradictory to expect “Barbie” from Vanga. We ain’t getting it!

Finally, we can all expect good from its sequel, by addressing all the bads and uglies in it along with the usual suspects. Let’s have our fingers crossed.

PS: Among other things, another Matrix I refer to decide whether the movie was entertaining is “Yawn Meter” In an air-conditioned environment it’s understandable if you get up to two yawns. If yawns get more than that then understand the movie is responsible for the boredom. My score for Animal was 2 yawns and Sam Bahadur also 2 yawns. Making them films with no added boredom on movie-going experience. Tell me about your score for any recent movie or any other technique you have in such situations!