Review of American Animals (2018) by Ahmedaiman9999 — 29 Aug 2018

Aside from the committed, and decent performances from the entire cast, most notably from Evan Peters who proves that he's one of the most talented young actors around, it's the movie's third act that made me barely like American Animals. The last act has some of the best hold-your-breath scenes I've seen this year. Case in point, the entire robbery sequence that really got on my nerves. Due to the impeccable editing, especially the sound editing in the mentioned scene, the movie left me mostly satisfied despite all its flaws, or maybe it's only one grave flaw that causes the others.

Fine acting, superb editing, perfect use of the soundtrack, and good cinematography. That's all the good this movie has throughout its entire runtime. So let's talk about the issues I've with American Animals. For starters, using the documentary style, and showing different opinions is a risky decision that if it was used wrong would be nothing but a cheap gimmick to get the attention. I, Tonya used a similar technique last year and it was good for the most part, I actually thought it would have been better if it made much use of it, but here it wasn't just useless, and didn't add to the characters, or serve the plot, but it also was very distracting and off-putting.

The second issue is that the movie never settles on one way to tell its story. It starts using this documentary style, which I thought it was interesting and promising at first, then the movie almost neglected this style or rather the most interesting part of it which is the different point of views, and what we got were some interrupting scenes of the real four young men explaining and justifying what they were feeling at these particular moments, and why they were doing so. I mean really! Is that how to tell a story, and develop the characters?!

The planning for the heist, and collecting the gang were kinda interesting. But after that, the movie chose a formulaic way to keep going; such as, the let-downs, and the regrets. And while these phase showed glimpses of adding real depth to the characters, a thing that was almost made me ignore the clichés, almost every dramatic moments felt forced, and the movie just didn't give enough time or prepared for these potentially affective scenes. Let alone the interrupting documentary that did nothing but preventing me from being invested even for a moment.

Comparing what I've praised to what I've criticized, I usually would a movie like this 3 stars, 6 to 6.5 out of 10, but this above-mentioned robbery scene blew me away. It has Fincher's rebelliousness, and Aronofsky's uneasiness mixed together but without being offensive. With that said, I can't give American Animals less than....