Unhinged Review- Russell Crowe’s Lunatic Is Falling Down Mad

The Russell Crowe vehicle Unhinged is exactly as advertised. It is slightly off, wildly entertaining, and weirdly compelling.

The first film to grace our indoor theaters is Unhinged. Beating Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated Tenet is director Derrick Borte’s nasty little slice of men gone wild. The road rage zonker gives voice to all the frustration and anger the pandemic has brought to our doorsteps. While I’m not entirely sure it is safe to go to the theaters, the first film back could be worse. Full disclosure I saw this film from the comfort and safety of my own home.

Rachel, a newly single mother, is dealing with a lot. She barely is making ends meet when she meets The Man, who also is having the worst day ever. We meet him on the night that he broke. He beats down the door of his ex-wife’s home and bludgeons her and an unknown male before setting everything fire. No explanation, just action, and that sums up everything he does from that point forward.

The opening sequence, meant to place the viewer firmly in the “our world is going to hell” land, is a little too manipulative to be effective. Spoon-feeding an audience images of violent encounters and voice-over commentary rarely has the punch… an actual punch does. Don’t fret; there is plenty of the latter from Russell Crowe’s bear claws later. Regardless, writer Carl Ellsworth valiantly steers the narrative to a place of societal blame. For better or worse, this muddy moral statement never fully gets resolved.

At times it’s hard to tell if the script by Ellsworth who wrote the not great Red Dawn, but more than serviceable Red Eye and Disturbia, is trying to pin the blame on the status quo instead of one cracked man. Is our world so corrupt and utterly devoid of compassion for the fellow man, we deserve to burn at the hands of brutish fire-eyed men who have been chewed up and rebirthed as something vengeful and hellbent?

Maybe Ellsworth is making a statement about gender roles and societal pressure to act the part? With Crowe’s The Man rampaging throughout the city for hours, it makes you wonder if this is an indictment on gender tropes and white maleness. There is no way a Black man could thunder through the city for hours on end, committing one crime after another without a significant police standoff. That confusion keeps the film from having a clear vision.

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Our protagonist, Rachel(Caren Pistorius), overslept. Her son Kyle, Gabriel Bateman from the recent Child’s Play reboot, acts much older than he should and is clearly the more responsible of the two. He is the perfect balance of adorable precociousness and over-it teenager. He is a highlight of the film. Rachel isn’t great, but she tries. When she makes a series of terrible mistakes, her world is turned upside down. That’s the chewy center of the film that works. You never know the effect a random chance encounter will have. I’m not willing to go as far as say we are all a second away from snapping and becoming a Lifetime murder porn special, but you never know what anyone else is going through.

Rachel makes a series of poor decisions, the first of which is not having a locked screen on her phone. If that cardinal sin of stupidity isn’t bad enough, she unwisely loses her shit on the worst possible person ever. Russell Crowe’s The Man has lost it. Not in an oh woah is me, my wife is trash, and I’ve got nothing left kind of way, but in a scorched earth kind of way. We first meet him, putting a decisive end to his marriage, and Rachel meets him the next morning after he’s got nothing to lose.

She meets The Man stopped at a red light. He fails to move when the light turns green, and Rachel lays on the horn. When The Man confronts her after she drove around him, he is irrationally upset. He thinks she was rude and is continuing to be that way. Her decision to honk and to refuse to apologize long after the disturbed man attacks her is ill-advised but understandable. She has problems of her own. Her husband is an absentee tool, she is in over her head caring for her son, younger brother, and girlfriend, and ailing mother. She, like The Man, snapped that day on the highway. The difference is, she hadn’t just killed two people and burned their house down.

Crowe’s antagonist, known only as The Man, thinks he is entitled to get his pound of flesh from Rachel. He hacks his way through the city and Rachel’s life, including her friend and lawyer Andy. I’ll admit anytime I see Jimmi Simpson’s(Andy) name on a cast list I schoolgirl giggle like a preadolescent at a Jonas Brothers concert. I can’t help it. His brief but welcome addition to the film provided the shift from this man is terrifying to holy shit. I’m ready to end you, which is something Rachel comes to when he threatens Kyle. When she changes from victim to aggressor, the film really takes off. Who doesn’t like a good chic victory? The lengths she is willing to go to to save her kid are entertaining and easily some of the best plot beats of the film.

It all boils down to two words. I’m sorry. Those words could have been the difference between everything that happened in the 80 minutes run time and an irritating if banal existence for Rachel and her family. With a character like The Man, things could never have ended any other way. He is disenfranchised, beaten down by circumstance, and bone-deep angry. He hates women and those that help them. Crowe’s villain is the ’60s era man who thinks women should be supportive without ever asking for anything for themselves.

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Although imposing physically and emotionally, Crowe doesn’t reach the same levels of sympathy as Michael Douglas in Falling Down or otherwordly evil like Rutger Howard in The Hitcher. Everything that led to his breakdown happened before the film begins. As a result, we are left with a monstrous but somewhat one-note lunatic. He heaves and bullies his girth through every scene after another. Crowe uses his size well. This is a man bruising for a fight. Ham-fisted and red-faced, he is rage personified. While I love Douglas and thought he was outstanding in Falling Down, he is nowhere near as horrifying as Crowe. Unlike Douglas, Crowe isn’t asked to be relatable. He knows he is a stand-in for every over-testosteroned angry toxic male. No one is going to relate to him.

Borte envisioned The Man as the shark from Jaws. He’s visceral and wild, unpredictable, and utterly terrifying. Crowe embraces his inner Viking and plunders and pillages his way through every scene. We haven’t seen Crowe break this bad since maybe since his notorious real-world meltdowns. He is believably mad. He also takes a fair amount of abuse later that inexplicably doesn’t affect him. Whether he is channeling Jason Vorhees or just hard-headed, the results are almost comical. The man can take a beating. Nuanced or not, I don’t want to run into him, ever. Note to self, when in doubt, don’t honk.

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Film Editing by Michael McCusker, Steve Mirkovich, and Tim Mirkovich is excellent. McCusker, who is known for Ford vs. Ferrari and Deadpool 2 knows how to shoot a car chase. The generic highways Rachel and The Man race through are more interesting for the cuts. Michael Mirkovich, known for Con-Air, knows how to edit action sequences. I realize Con-Air isn’t exactly the bastion of all things holy, but the action sequences were supremely well edited. They were loud, bombastic, and wild, exactly like Unhinged. These three professionals understood what this film was and delivered a high octane thriller.

Like classic road warrior movies that came before, Unhinged lays hard into the anonymity that quickly could turn to vulnerability. There are problems, but the action sequences are great, the violence is brutal, and Crowe is letting it all hang out. Is Unhinged worth the risk of a theater? I don’t know. Only you can answer that. To be honest it might be more fun in a drive-in theater where everyone is behind the wheel. Unhinged is an unapologetic thrill ride. It is a loud, ugly slice of Americana courtesy of Route 66.