Russell Crowe is no stranger to onscreen rage.
From his break-out role in Romper Stomper as an anarchic neo-Nazi skinhead to tearing it up in The Mummy as Mr Hyde, we’ve seen Crowe explode in fits of seething anger.
But nothing quite prepares you for the unrelenting, focused and primal aggression of Crowe’s character in Unhinged.
He’s like the T-1000, an unstoppable force of pure violence – a cinematic bogeyman to be feared, a monster without explanation.
Releasing today in cinemas, Unhinged is a throwback to the escapist thrillers or horror movies of a certain era, a battle of wills between a clearly delineated villain with a disciplined albeit illogical mission and his object of torment cum hero.
Crowe’s character, never named and referred to in press materials as “the man” is less like Dennis Hopper in Speed or John Malkovich in Con Air, and more akin to Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees.
He’s not an agent of chaos, he’s a horrifying manifestation of toxic rage.
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Unhinged follows a simple premise, young mother Rachel (Caren Pistorius) has a “case of the Mondays”. She’s running late dropping her son off to school and was just fired by a client for her perpetual tardiness.
The temperature is rising in this unidentified US city (but filmed in New Orleans) and the traffic is jammed up so that a 10-minute drive on a Sunday takes one hour on a weekday.
Stuck behind a ute that’s not moving despite the green light, Rachel honks her horn, hard.
It’s an all-too common small act of road rage that usually elicits an embarrassed look or an up-yours from the recipient. But today, the man (Crowe) sitting behind the wheel of that ute is not someone who believes in a proportional response.
The man, we find out in the opening scenes, has already killed his ex-wife and new lover, burning their house to the ground the previous night.
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Rachel’s act of micro-aggression makes her the target of the man’s sociopathic anger as he stalks her across the city’s labyrinthine roads and highways and entangling her family and friends, played by the likes of Gabriel Bateman, Austin P. McKenzie and Jimmi Simpson.
Unhinged is an aggressively intense experience – it may be escapism but it’s going to make you clench every muscle in the process.
There’s constant forward momentum in its fast pacing, while it mixes up the environments from boom-smash highway chases to close-quarter hand-to-hand.
There’s no let-up in its heart-thumping execution, so it’s a good thing it’s a brisk 93 minutes with credits.
Where Unhinged, directed by Derrick Borta from a script by Carl Ellsworth, falters is in trying to inject too much real-world context for “the man”.
The film is at pains to parse the myriad pressures of modern life – too many cars, too many people, fraying tempers, job losses and economic doom. That and an attempt to explain the man’s state of mind come off as clumsy.
In trying to “humanise” the man as someone who’s been through a relationship breakdown and laid off from his job weeks out from retirement comes close to trying to provide some justification for his violence.
There is no way to justify it, and if you’re going to dangle those threads without going into more detail – maybe his relationship broke down because he was abusive or he was fired for being violent – is irresponsible, as if he was “pushed too far”.
Unhinged is trying to make the situation – Rachel’s small transgression – relatable by teaching us to consider other people’s pain and grievances before we mutter something under our breath or honk our horn.
But it doesn’t do the work to really consider the wider systemic or social issues that leads to someone like the man.
So, it would’ve been better off keeping it simple – monster versus non-monster. That would have been more than satisfying.
Rating: 3/5
Unhinged is in cinemas now
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2020-07-30 07:21:55Z
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