Isn’t it about time that America’s film schools added a “How to End Your Movie” course to their curricula? I know that they don’t have such “Finishing” or “Stick the Landing” stand-alone tutorials set up, and not just from covering such schools in a couple of states. I know it because I’m seeing more movies of late that fail to finish.

“Animals” has two film school alumni (UCLA, University of Colorado) among its screenwriting credits And it’s directed and co-written by star Ben Affleck, who did “The Town” and didn’t do film school.

And no matter whose fault it is, “Animals” has one of the most glaring examples of “botched ending” to come along in recent years. A well-cast, well-acted and perfectly respectable, kind of functional two, two-and-a-half star thriller drops to one and a half stars in the last ten minutes.

The plot is a straight-up rip-off of Spike Lee and Alan Fox’s “Highest 2 Lowest.” Kidnappers grab someone they think is a rich and famous person’s child only to have the kid — disguised in a Halloween costume this time — turn out to be the gardener’s son.

Mix in politics — Affleck plays an Angelino lawyer running for mayor — sexual intrigues and a collection of sketchy characters we might suspect of being involved in the kidnapping based on what they have to gain or lose and you’re off to a very promising start.

Might an idealistic independent candidate, trailing in the polls, or his campaign manager (Steven Yeun of “Minari” and “Nope”) have set this up as a stunt to grab the Latino vote?

Has the candidate made one too many enemies along life’s way?

Could the candidate’s cheating marriage psychotherapist wife (Kerry Washington) have hooked up with the wrong paramour?

We’re even allowed to wonder if the political opposition is mixed up in this, or even the LAPD, who back the sitting mayor.

Could the housekeeper (Adriana Paz) or her “illegal” beau (Luis Gerardo Méndez), whose son was taken by accident, be implicated?

And how about about that quiet, officious, greedy and inscrutable “fixer” (Gillian Anderson) the campaign manager calls out of desperation? Could she be pulling the strings even as she’s asserting with certitude that this or that probability is the one that’s playing out, and this or that move is the “only” play in the situation at this time?

Affleck does a good job of playing and setting up his character — an opening act campaign ad for the confident, Spanish-speaking activist, combat vet and lifelong do-gooder played by the guy many in Hollywood (his pal Matt Damon chief among them) assumed would plunge into politics.

But Mark Kimball has spent himself into the hole and is still trailing in the polls.

Washington does her best “distant and getting more so spouse” as Abigail, who has found a younger, less well-off and less complicated lover. The campaign has taken over their lives, ended their privacy and she’s over it.

Neither can find a way to help housekeeper Ceci (Paz) get her overqualified gardener/boyfriend (Méndez) a decent job when he hasn’t got citizenship.

As a prospective mayor, Mark “can’t enforce laws that he does not abide.”

We’ve seen the white van, the repair shop far too close to the railroad tracks, the one where an unseen stranger is online stalking our candidate and his family.

When the Kimball kid and gardener Ramon’s boy go trick-or-treating over Santa Monica way, without “security,” we know what’s coming. Noticing that the biracial boy and Latino kid look alike, that their matching costumes have head covering masks tips us that this could go wrong.

“Picture what your son would look like in a dumpster,” the fuming, voice-disguised kidnapper growls when the snatching’s done.

Before the “wrong boy” business is figured out, the troubled, stressed couple has to melt down, the meddling manager has to interfere and a high-priced “invisible” fixer has to be summoned for her advice, counsel and high HIGH interest ransom loan.

“Our adversary has made a mistake,” she muses when the mix-up is uncovered. “This is when they stumble. This is when they’re most vulnerable.”

They need to put the kidnappers off their game, trip them up. And even if that isn’t the Kimball kid, they have to get young Hector back — $7 million+ price tag be damned. If Mark’s going to win election, he can’t have every Latino voter knowing that he values the lives of “the help” less than his own kin.

And this “fixer” isn’t one to take “My kid’s safe, never mind” as an “out” for their contract.

A lot of very good actors are thrown at all the promising elements set up here, with only a few plot threads are woven into something that improves the whole. A lot of intrigues are presented as complex, when the script unravels them with bizarre stumbles and missed chances.

The notion that their best “option” will involve “something that we take to the grave” should raise the stakes, but instead just falls flat.

Anderson’s character is wholly constructed out of the actress’s ability to suggest a sort of serene menace. Her every pronouncement is psychobabble that the “real” psychotherapist among the characters should cut to pieces.

“Animals” is a movie that almost but never quite gets us there in every scene in the three acts. And then this film schooled script all goes to pieces in a finale that doesn’t so much “stick the landing” and poke a finger in the viewer’s eye and hope we don’t notice.

Rating: R, violence, profanity, sexual situation

Cast: Ben Affleck, Kerry Washington, Steven Yeun, Gillian Anderson, Adriana Paz and Luis Gerardo Méndez

Credits: Directed by Ben Affleck, scripted by Connor O. McIntyre, Billy Ray and Ben Affleck. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48