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Animal Kingdom | 2010 | R | - 4.7.10

The story follows the Cody crime family, known in Australia for armed robbery and drugs: Three brothers teach their teen nephew (James Frecheville) criminal skills after his mom dies of a drug overdose, while their mom (Jacki Weaver) supervises the training and blackmails authorities. The oldest brother (Ben Mendelsohn) is a psychopath, the middle brother (Sullivan Stapleton) is a cocaine dealer and junkie, and the youngest (Luke Ford) just goes along. Also with Joel Edgerton and Guy Pearce. Directed by David Michôd. [1.52]

SEX/NUDITY 4 - In several scenes, an elderly woman kisses her three adult sons and her teen grandson "hello" on the lips for a prolonged period, and in one scene she sits in her son's lap; all of the men appear uncomfortable. A man kisses his wife briefly in three scenes.
 A teen boy lies in bed fully dressed and when he gets up to leave we see a teen girl lying behind him wearing a tank top that reveals cleavage and bare arms, and long-legged pajama bottoms; it is unclear if they had sex and when the girl walks into the hallway her mother says, "You're still in school and your boyfriends are allowed to sleep over; that's a big thing for me."
 A man asks a teen boy if handguns give him a "stiffy"; the boy says nothing. A man asks his brother if he is gay 10 times and the brother repeatedly denies it.
 A few women appear in blouses that reveal cleavage, bare shoulders and arms. One woman wears short-shorts that reveal most of her thighs and legs. A man appears in several scenes shirtless, with many small tattoos on his back, chest and arms (we see his full bare chest, arms, shoulders and back). Two men appear in sleeveless undershirts and we see tattoos on their arms and shoulders. A teen boy in a shower scene is shown from the waist-up and we see his bare chest. An elderly woman appears in several scenes wearing a loose short dress that reveals most of her bare legs.
 In a public washroom, a teen boy urinates with his back to the camera (we cannot hear the action and do not see anything).

VIOLENCE/GORE 7 - Two police officers check out an abandoned car on a road at night: one gets into the vehicle, we hear a pop, we see him sprayed with blood, we hear a second pop and see him struck by a bullet that leaves a small red wound; the officer falls out of the car, three men stand beside him and one shoots him with a shotgun three times and the men run off. Two police officers approach a man in a car, one speaks to him through the driver's window, someone yells, "He's got a gun!" and we hear a pop and see the inside of the car windows splatter with blood. A man and a teen boy talk in a bedroom, we hear a pop, and see a spray of blood against a wall as one of them falls, presumably dead.
 A man listens to a police scanner, hears dogs barking, yells, runs around the house packing his belongings and then runs into a field, and two police officers shoot at him; he is struck spraying a little blood into the air, falls twice, the second time onto his face, and a close up shows flies sitting on his face as he breathes deeply once and then stops.
 A man offers a teen girl a dose of heroin, telling her it's a shot that is fun, she agrees and he delivers the injection off-screen; she becomes sleepy, he slaps her in the face while asking if she reported him to the police, she denies it, and he pushes her back into her chair, suffocates her by covering her mouth and nose and carries her body outside at night.
 An elderly woman hits her son three times, they struggle and stop; the man chases a teen boy out the front door, stops and slams another man's head into a wall three times. Two young men wrestle, but no one is hurt.
 A teen boy holds a handgun in his lap in a car while a man drives; two young men in another car curse at them, make an obscene hand gesture and drive off, the man chases them, corners them and tells the boy to get out of the car and threatened them with the gun (he does and the young men shout and drive away).
 A woman asks an attorney to have her grandson killed; we see four police officers with guns drawn approaching the house where the teen boy is hiding, he runs away and an officer points a gun at the boy but does not shoot. An armed SWAT team enters a home and takes a teen boy and a man into custody; another man is handcuffed and sitting, already in custody (all three are released). A teen boy rides as a protected witness in an armored car with SWAT team members; one of them points a handgun at the boy's head, smiles slightly and then holsters the gun.
 We see a teen girl's body lying in a place with colorful stone figures. We see investigators examining a crime scene and TV newscasts report killers being on the loose.
 A man drives a car with a teen boy as a passenger; another man in another car comes out of a side street, rams his car into the side of the first car and the boy gets out and runs away.
 A woman sleeps on a sofa beside her teen son, two EMTs walk in and examine the woman and give her an unknown injection off-screen after we see a hypodermic needle; we later see the boy speaking on the phone and asking a woman to make funeral arrangements for his mom.
 A man hears that another man died; he screams, throws things and cries in his mother's arms. A teen girl's mother hears of her daughter's death from her husband talking to someone on the phone and she cries. A teen boy goes to his girlfriend's house after learning she is dead, enters the bathroom, and sits on the toilet to cry. We see people gathered outside a funeral home with a white hearse parked at the curb. We see the closed casket of a man at a funeral.
 A man tells a friend about throwing rocks at cars as a kid and getting into fights and then shooting guys as an adult.
 We see four black and white still shots from a surveillance camera of three masked and gloved gunmen pointing guns at people in banks, which they are robbing.
 A police officer fires his pistol into a black box on the floor 5 times, and places it into his holster. At a farmhouse a man practices shooting a shotgun into a shed.

LANGUAGE 10 - About 71 F-words, 1 obscene hand gesture, 7 scatological terms, 4 anatomical terms, 3 mild obscenities, name-calling (idiot, grubby, crazy, unstuck, insane, gay), 2 religious profanities, 3 religious exclamations.

SUBSTANCE USE - A man offers a teen girl heroin, which she accepts and becomes sleepy, an EMT injects a woman with a hypodermic needle off-screen and the scene ends, a man snorts a line of cocaine with a large-diameter tube, a man cuts four lines of cocaine on a table with a credit card and offers the drug to several people, who decline (it is implied that the man snorted the drugs off screen), a man swallows an unknown tablet, a man uses a bong and inhales deeply, we hear that a woman died of a heroin overdose, an empty pill bottle sits on a table near a woman sleeping on a couch, a teen boy tells a detective that he smoked marijuana and cannot remember anything about a night on which two murders occurred, we hear that a man sells drugs, two men discuss drug dealing and that it is cleaner than armed robbery and makes more money, a woman tells her psychopathic criminal son, "Maybe you should start taking your pills again," and a man explains to a teen boy that there is a fad of injecting hypos of heroin and calling them "hotshots." A woman and two men pour glasses of champagne and drink and one man appears inebriated when he staggers to a telephone, a bar contains about two dozen bottles of liquor (we see this twice), several bottles of wine sit on a kitchen counter, a man drinks a bottle of beer, a man drinks from a glass and says it is Bourbon and Coke, a teen boy drops a bottle of beer and it breaks, a woman tells her teen grandson that his mother and she were both drunk the last time they saw each other, we see a teen girl at a bar holding an empty glass and a teen boy holds a beer bottle (we do not see them drink), and a police detective tells a teen boy that he could be arrested for under-aged drinking. A man lights and smokes a cigarette in a restaurant and he's told twice to put it out (he leaves and smokes outside), a woman smokes, a man smokes in several scenes, and we see an ashtray full of cigarette butts and one full of cigar butts. A grocery store aisle displays aspirin and other over the counter remedies.

DISCUSSION TOPICS - Families, crime, violence, guns, murder, illegal drugs and mental illness, blackmail, crooked cops, justice, revenge, survival.

MESSAGE - Some people behave like wild animals.

CAVEATS

Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.

We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.

Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.


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