I've never watched the TV show "Animal Kingdom," but if it's based upon the movie then I may want to take a gander.
"Animal Kingdom" takes place in Australia. The main subjects of the movie are a criminally active family with a very approving mother. Things get thick when one of her son's (Joel Edgerton) is murdered by the police and his brothers take revenge. Joshua 'J' Cody (James Frecheville), their nephew, gets mixed up in it all because he now has to stay with them since his mother OD'ed on heroin.
The movie is intense at times, and dragging at other times. I think that a lot of the drama could've been avoided if the oldest brother, Andrew 'Pope' Cody (Ben Mendelsohn), wasn't so epically stupid. It's actually kind of weird how dumb he was considering he seemed like a clever criminal.
When he and his brother Darren (Luke Ford) went to assassinate a couple of cops they left their nephew J at home. They came back and told J nothing of the crime though he could easily gather what they had done. When the police interrogated J he didn't know what to say because he was never told what to say. The police let them all go because they had nothing solid, and they would never have anything solid because even though J was a teenager and therefore the weak link, he never saw anything. But, for whatever reason, Pope thought that J would be his undoing and went out of his way to make sure J didn't talk to the cops. It amazed me how it didn't occur to Pope that J couldn't say anything to put him away because he never partook in the crime. The most J could say was, "My uncles left at such-and-such a time and they came back x amount of hours later." That's it, and that's if he was feeling talkative.
That was my biggest gripe with the film which seemed to be the most crucial part of the plot. In essence, if Pope was never wary of J, then there'd be no movie--or the movie would've been significantly shorter. Even with that glaring flaw I liked it. The mother/grandmother (Jacki Weaver) was something else. She made the movie for me.
"Animal Kingdom" takes place in Australia. The main subjects of the movie are a criminally active family with a very approving mother. Things get thick when one of her son's (Joel Edgerton) is murdered by the police and his brothers take revenge. Joshua 'J' Cody (James Frecheville), their nephew, gets mixed up in it all because he now has to stay with them since his mother OD'ed on heroin.
The movie is intense at times, and dragging at other times. I think that a lot of the drama could've been avoided if the oldest brother, Andrew 'Pope' Cody (Ben Mendelsohn), wasn't so epically stupid. It's actually kind of weird how dumb he was considering he seemed like a clever criminal.
When he and his brother Darren (Luke Ford) went to assassinate a couple of cops they left their nephew J at home. They came back and told J nothing of the crime though he could easily gather what they had done. When the police interrogated J he didn't know what to say because he was never told what to say. The police let them all go because they had nothing solid, and they would never have anything solid because even though J was a teenager and therefore the weak link, he never saw anything. But, for whatever reason, Pope thought that J would be his undoing and went out of his way to make sure J didn't talk to the cops. It amazed me how it didn't occur to Pope that J couldn't say anything to put him away because he never partook in the crime. The most J could say was, "My uncles left at such-and-such a time and they came back x amount of hours later." That's it, and that's if he was feeling talkative.
That was my biggest gripe with the film which seemed to be the most crucial part of the plot. In essence, if Pope was never wary of J, then there'd be no movie--or the movie would've been significantly shorter. Even with that glaring flaw I liked it. The mother/grandmother (Jacki Weaver) was something else. She made the movie for me.