There are two kinds of people in a kidnapping movie: the people who have something to lose and the people who know exactly what that something is worth. The first group screams, sweats, and makes terrible decisions. The second group counts the money. In Animals, Ben Affleck wants to tell us that eventually everybody winds up doing both, because strip away enough layers of civilization and the human being underneath is just another hungry mammal with a credit rating.

Now there's a movie in that idea. Unfortunately, there's also a rather different movie lurking inside Animals, one that seems to have misplaced its pulse somewhere between the screenplay revisions and the turning on of the cameras.

Affleck directs and stars as Mark Kimball, a Los Angeles mayoral candidate whose carefully manicured existence goes straight down the toilet when his young son is apparently kidnapped. Mark and his wife, Abigail (Kerry Washington), must somehow produce seven million dollars while navigating the sort of secrets, betrayals, and political calculations that make you wonder whether anyone in this town has ever experienced an unmonetized emotion. Enter Mark's political adviser, Sam (Steven Yeun), and a coolly enigmatic fixer played by Gillian Anderson, who looks like she could negotiate a hostage release, acquire a small European nation, and have you liquidated before lunch.

Then comes the first major complication: the kidnapped boy isn't Mark's son at all, but the son of the family's housekeeper. Suddenly, the movie's title starts to make a little more sense. Everybody has been talking about morality, responsibility, and public service, but what happens when the emergency stops being hypothetical and starts knocking on the door of your gated community?

This is rich territory for a thriller. It's practically a whole continent of it. The trouble is that Animals occasionally behaves like a tourist who's been dropped into the middle of a revolution and keeps stopping to consult the guidebook.

Affleck has established himself as a director with a real feel for muscular crime pictures. Gone Baby Gone had moral bruises you could practically touch. The Town understood that criminality could be both a social condition and a terrible personal habit. Air demonstrated that the man could make corporate negotiations feel like a heavyweight title fight. Here, though, he seems to have brought the machinery without quite bringing the electricity.

Much of Animals unfolds in expensive rooms occupied by people explaining what they think they ought to do. The phone rings, somebody gets angry, somebody else reveals a secret, and then everyone stands around discussing the implications as though they're trapped in an especially hostile board meeting. The kidnapping provides the ticking clock, but the film too often forgets that a clock is supposed to tick. It just sits there, an expensive wristwatch on a corpse.

And the corpse, in this case, is the movie's political imagination. Mark is supposed to represent a particular species of progressive ambition: the wealthy, polished, media-friendly candidate who believes he can make the world better without surrendering any of the privileges that made him comfortable in the first place. His son's disappearance threatens to turn those beliefs into something more than campaign rhetoric. What would he sacrifice? Whose suffering would he consider acceptable? Does he believe in justice, or does he believe in the appearance of justice so long as the right people are watching?

Washington deserves better material. Abigail has the ingredients of a fascinating character, but her private resentments and marital complications never acquire quite enough psychological weight. Washington supplies the heat; the screenplay keeps turning down the thermostat. Yeun has a similar problem: there's a potentially interesting calculation behind Sam's loyalty, but the film doesn't dig deeply enough into the dirt. Everybody has motives, but not everybody gets a personality.

Anderson, on the other hand, seems to have wandered in from a considerably more entertaining movie. As the fixer, she possesses the unnerving composure of someone who knows the rules because she helped write them, and she delivers an icy, almost mechanical authority that cuts through the surrounding fuss. Whenever she's on screen, Animals briefly remembers that crime pictures can be fun, that menace is a form of performance, and that sometimes the most frightening person in the room is the one who never raises her voice.

Visually, the film is frustratingly anonymous for a production with cinematographer Robert Elswit behind the camera. Los Angeles should be a character in this story, a city where money can build walls around almost anything except the consequences of its own existence. Yet the film spends so much time in enclosed spaces that the broader social landscape barely registers. The rooms are expensive, the dialogue is tense, and the images too rarely give those ingredients the extra kick they need.

There's also the unavoidable shadow of Akira Kurosawa's High and Low, the 1963 kidnapping drama whose central moral dilemma provides an obvious point of comparison. Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest has already brought that basic setup into contemporary New York. Affleck's version shifts the emphasis toward electoral ambition and the American politics of wealth, but the comparison only sharpens the problem: a premise this potent needs more than a collection of respectable performances and a few nasty plot turns. It needs the conviction to make every revelation hurt.

Still, Animals isn't without a certain grim appeal. Affleck understands the humiliating spectacle of powerful people discovering that money cannot immediately solve everything. There's something satisfying about watching the machinery of privilege begin to seize up, watching polished public identities crack under pressure. And the film's best moments remind us that the distinction between civilized and savage behavior can be thinner than a campaign promise.

But a thriller about people becoming animals ought to make us feel the transformation. It should leave us wondering which character has crossed the line, which one never had a line to begin with, and whether we would behave any better if the telephone rang in our own house.

Animals gets close enough to those questions to make its timidity frustrating. It has the premise, the cast, and the pedigree. What it lacks is the feral conviction to tear through its own respectable surface.

The beast is in there somewhere. You can hear it scratching at the door.

You just wish Affleck would let the damn thing out.

Animals is currently streaming on Netflix.