Raj5 on Animal

I saw Animal here in the U.S. on a Sunday night (housefull theater, will end up in the top 3 highest grossing Hindi movie in the U.S. for sure).

First of all, my biases: Huge SRK fan, fell asleep in theaters out of boredom during Kabir Singh (but thought that it had its moments), have no strong preferences among the younger stars, but I like Ranbir & Vicky more than Ranveer (can’t stand him off screen), and I can tolerate blood/gore on screen such as a Mirzapur, but I can’t watch/have to fast forward for example the assault scenes in Bulbul.

Overall: Worth a watch, if you can handle the trigger warnings. It has some absolutely brilliant moments. It also has some Hate Story-level cringe dialogue. But reflecting on the movie 2 days later, I’m remembering the excellent acting, shock moments, and phenomenal music/bgm. I think I’ll need to give it a second viewing.

This movie is not some masterpiece that’s going to go viral worldwide. Nor is it simply just appealing to the lowest common denominator etc. I think both are just hyperbole, and both sides decided when they bought their movie ticket which side they wanted to take. There’s the skeleton of an excellent movie, but SRV goes overboard and needs to get a second editor to reel him in. The movie explores so many themes– I haven’t seen any professional reviewer outside of Baradwaj Rangan even talk about them (which in hindsight isn’t that surprising giving how biased and stupid the English speaking reviewers of Film Companion are, and likewise for the the Hindi Samosa critics). I thought this movie was about 30 minutes away from brilliance. The 10-15 minutes I would replace in the movie are actually all of the misogynistic-type and sexual innuendo scenes everyone’s been reading about ( I’m not including the Tripti-Ranbir subplot in this, thought that was fine for the story as well). I thought they were just completely unnecessary to the overall story, and had they replaced it with more plot about Bobby Deol’s character, or more of the Ranbir-Anil relationship. And then there are another 15 minutes of exposition that just don’t add anything. I watch all Indian movies regularly, so I thought I’d get fatigue at the the machine gun scene, but I actually enjoyed it and it was instead the Vikram type post-credit scene that I rolled my eyes at.

Lastly, all of the truly problematic misogynistic scenes are at maximum a total of 5-10 minutes. You can’t convince me (given the Monday and Tuesday collections) that people are going to rewatch a 200 minute movie on a weekday just to rewatch and cheer at those 5 scenes. But for the unhinged violent actions of Ranbir and the Tripti subplot? Definitely. But overall I don’t find that the action a problem, unless now we start seeing a U.S. level of gun violence and infidelity among dudes in India with daddy issues.