It would be a stretch to say that the release of a Ben Affleck movie ever qualified as an event. Even in the late 1990s and the early 2000s — the post-Good Will Hunting window during which he was most plausibly anointed for stardom — Affleck tended to be recklessly productive in a way that diluted his brand. Was Forces of Nature (1999) an event? Was Changing Lanes (2002) a big deal? Was there a lot of press surrounding Paycheck (2003)? I am purposely omitting the flat-out bombs (Reindeer Games [2000], Gigli [2003], Jersey Girl [2004]) that Affleck has long seemed drawn to with alarming frequency.

Yet no two consecutive Affleck movies have ever been bigger nonevents than the two that saw the light of day this year, the laborious police procedural The Rip and the new alleged thriller Animals — both released on Netflix, both bearing annoyingly vague titles that offer no clue about their stories, both produced by the performer’s company with Good Will Hunting pal Matt Damon, Artists Equity, and most ominously of all, the latter directed and co-written by him. Affleck has become irrelevant not by ceasing to work but by continuing to lend his likeness to the modern cinematic equivalents of Muzak.