Reader Recommendation: Animal Kingdom

Today's movie comes thanks to twitter user @nshady who recommended that I watch Animal Kingdom. I had heard quite a lot about this movie, but I had totally forgotten about it until he reminded me about it not too long ago. This crime drama revolves around an Australian crime family, in particular a young man, Josh, who has just recently been pulled back into the fold after his mother dies. He seems to have no emotions whatsoever, and it's not long before they start involving him in their affairs. What could go wrong? Well, hit the jump to find out.


To put it simply, everything goes wrong. The police have already been on the family's tail and they're looking for one member in particular. When they can't find him, Hell breaks loose and lets just say things quickly get out of hand. 17-year-old Josh, played by James Frecheville, is now left with a tricky choice of turning on the family he barely knows, or staying true even though they might kill him in their own growing paranoia.

Mom knows best, even if you're all thieves and killers

Even though this movie is only about a hour and 40 minutes, it felt much longer than that. It's quite a slow paced movie, but the tension in some scenes is nearly unbearable. Quite frequently I found myself twisting in my seat waiting for something to happen, finding myself holding my breath. And then, just when you think it's going to happen, the scene keeps drawing it out more and it drove me mad! To be honest though, if the movie was much longer, I probably would have started getting really bored, thankfully though there's always just enough going on that kept me in the film.

Animal Kingdom gets most of its buzz from the acting in the film. The acting job done by James Frecheville was good and his stone cold exterior was pretty interesting. He doesn't even react when his own mother dies! He just seems dead to the world and everything going on around him. That's not to say he never shows emotion, what it does mean is that when he does it's all the more powerful. The mother of the family is played by Jacki Weaver, and she won several awards for her performance in this, and was nominated for an Oscar for it as well. I thought she was ok, definitely had a bit of a creepy vibe to her, but I'm not sure if I felt that because I'd heard she was creepy so much before in other reviews.

James Frecheville plays it calm & cold as Josh

That's the problem I really had with this movie. I've heard so much about it previously that I'm not sure what has and hasn't coloured my opinions, and if I would have felt differently seeing this movie cold. As it is I'm noticing all kinds of things that reviewers had previously pointed out and seeing performances the way they said they should be seen. It was mainly because of all the coverage I heard about this movie that I started deciding to go into most movies knowing as little as possible as you may have noticed in some of my reviews. As it is though, the "damage" had already been done on Animal Kingdom.

In the end, I did enjoy Animal Kingdom, but not as much as I had been hoping. I probably also had my hopes up after I heard so much about it. As far as crime stories go, it was pretty good and there's a few turns in the plot that I didn't really expect, so that was good. Really this movie is all about the tension though. It's a solid thriller and a good drama. I guess I just wish it wasn't quite so slowly paced. All the same, thanks to @nshady for reminding me about this movie, I'm glad you did!