The Animal Kingdom

Directed by Edward H. Griffith, The Animal Kingdom follows Leslie Howard’s Tom as he finds himself falling in love with (and eventually forced to choose between) Ann Harding’s Daisy and Myrna Loy’s Cecelia. Filmmaker Griffith, armed with a script by Horace Jackson, delivers a predominantly sluggish and perpetually uninvolving misfire that strikes all the wrong notes right from the get-go, as the movie, which runs a palpably overlong (and padded-out) 85 minutes, kicks off with an arms-length opening stretch that progresses at an almost impossibly deliberate pace – with the far-from-enthralling atmosphere compounded by the narrative’s decidedly (and aggressively) stagy bent. (The entire first act transpires mostly within the confines of a single room, for example.) It doesn’t help, either, that The Animal Kingdom has been peppered with a handful of time-wasting (and hopelessly pointless) digressions that contribute little to the picture’s overall impact, with this particularly true of a long, drawn-out sequence wherein Tom works up the courage to fire his butler/friend (William Gargan’s Regan). By the time the endless second half rolls around, The Animal Kingdom has definitively cemented its place as a woefully underwhelming disaster that squanders a trio of admittedly affable central performances.

* out of ****