Animal 2

Animal 2

With ‘Animal 2’ we have a Direct to Video sequel of a Direct to Video movie, which is something we don’t see to often. The first ‘Animal’ starring Ving Rhames , Terence Howard and Chaz Palminteri probably didn’t intend to go Direct to Video with that kind of talent in front of the camera but director David J. Burke who managed to briefly sidetrack the careers of legends and Academy Award winners Morgan Freeman AND Kevin Spacey with the awful ‘Edison Force’ didn’t do the cast of ‘Animal’ any great favors either, though ‘Animal’ was better than ‘Edison Force’.

In this sequel not only has the director been replaced by ‘Straight outta Compton’s’ Ryan combs, Terence Howard’s character of Darius as been supplanted by actor Vicellous Reon Shannon and Palminteri’s Kasada has been replaced by actor Conrad Dunn. Do all of these changes make this film better than the mediocre first episode?

When we last left Animal (Rhames) he was a changed man from his brutal street ways and had just taken the rap for his son Darius (Howard) in order to prevent him from degenerating in jail, taking his third strike.

Fifteen years have passed and now Darius is a different man who looks way younger than his actual age. He has taken on the responsibility of looking after his half-brother James Jr. (K.C. Collins), who is now in high school and whom we last saw as a small infant in the previous movie of the series. James is an innocent boy, who gets good grades like any other child but likes to call it a ‘smoke break’ now and then with a side kick who is constantly looking for trouble, Tommy (Kevin Duhaney).

But in the same context, in the joint, things seem to take a different turn for Animal. A riot has broken out in the prison, and he has become the culprit for that. As a result, Animal is secured and transported back to the facilities that comprise his older prison. There he meets his old friend Kasada (Dunn) who runs an underground fight club in another cell and tries to convince the deceptively immortal Animal to fight for his club. Animal is not shy about letting Kasada know that his idea is ludicrous. But, as a criminal, Kasada has Plan B.

Plan B, however, is where the narrative draws the most controversy and goes off the lane. This is because it pulls into the picture characters like the assistant district attorney, his fiancée who happens to be his lawyer, the warden, a drug dealer who gets murdered in order to frame James Jr. for the murder. All of these folks, it seems, were played like puppets by Kasada from behind the bars and all because they wanted to induce The Animal to beat some hapless guy in a cage fight.

Given what Kasada seems to be able to pull off from behind the walls of this prison, the conspiracy for the assassination of President John Kennedy that has been under investigation for several decades now has been cracked. The focus in this case is to get James Jr. off the bogus murder rap and invicta’s The Animal’s attempts at killing the rest of the inmates in the cage fighting competition to allow him to go back to his favourite activity of reading from the good book.

The first movie had great actor Terence Howard but he was miscast because he was too old at 35 to be playing the rebellious young hoodlum punk child of James ‘Animal’ Allen since the two looked fairly close in age. Certainly, Shannon is a much superior candidate for the role but I take after Terence Howard more than he does.

Then, Vicellous Shannon probably looks more like Terence Howard than Ving Rhames. Also, Ving Rhames plays the main character who is James Allen and I do believe he steals the show however there’s no denying that Allen is also quite the character as he’s certainly the fiercest movie badass to walk in history. Most of the time, it feels like kicking the butt of most theatrics is fairly possible regardless of the role but there’s absolutely no way that I’m taking a chance with Ving Rhames no matter what.

But a few of the plot twists especially the lengths they went to in order to set James Jr up for murder were really dumb in the very least, in this case they were forced. There was a part when a furious James Jr went to get drug dealer Silk he was waving a gun at him. So after he left, one of his associates queried whether they would chase after him, but Silk said ‘no’ because when he was a lil G, Animal protected him. But he was not much of a protector to Animal, up to the point of setting up the capital murder of his son. Even the characters themselves scarcely contain themselves not to display their disbelief.

There is this part about the assistant D. A, who was mutually blackmailed by Kasada and D.A. himself for some reason, made this arrangement to have his public defender fiancée be James Jr.’s Defense lawyer because, wait for it, he thinks he can ‘control’ her. He can’t control her which results in Kasada ordering the D.A. to murder his fiancée while blaming him for being so foolish as to have dragged her into it in the first place. I could not have said it better myself.

Director Combs certainly keeps the film on track and I bet he had far less material to work with in this sequel than the original director wasted in the first film, but it did show us as ‘Animal 2’ was definitely entertaining in a pinch.

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