In August of 2025, Spike Lee released “Highest 2 Lowest”, his fifth collaboration with Danzel Washington. The movie is about a wealthy music executive, played by Danzel Washington, who has his son kidnapped, only to find out later that the kidnappers took the son of his best friend, by mistake. The moral question follows: will Danzel’s character still give the kidnappers millions of dollars even though the son they kidnapped is not his child?

Suprisingly, the new Ben Affleck Netflix film, “Animals”, has just about the exact same premise as Highest 2 Lowest. So similar that Ben Affleck delayed the production of his film to avoid the obvious comparisons between the two. It is hard to understand why Affleck, one of the three screenwriters, did not create a major rewrite to avoid what could be a future copyright infringement lawsuit, given how alarmingly similar these movies are.

The two main characters, Mark Kimball (Ben Affleck) and David King (Denzel Washington), are both wealthy and having money problems, due to debt at the time of the kidnapping. Mark Kimball is running for mayor of Los Angeles, and David King is a well-known music mogul. One main difference is that Kimball hires an expensive kidhapping expert Dayle Burton (Gillian Anderson), who charges 20% of the ransom to try solve the kidnapping with options that include even killing the kidnappers. Kerry Washington plays Kimball’s wife Abigail Kimball, and acting scenes with Affleck that were highly emotional and well performed throughout. There are other well played scenes with Ben Affleck and Gillian Anderson, with large contrasts of a distraught Affleck and an always very calm Anderson.

The ending was well done with original ideas, and a final conclusion that many will question based on several lies that were told to the police to avoid political damage to Kimball’s mayoral campaign.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating of 36% is too low – as this is not a bad movie, aside from the possible plagiarism issues. I rank this movie as a passable 70%, mainly due to the acting of Affleck, Anderson and Washington.