Unhinged is a perfectly decent thriller that probably won’t stay in your memory bank for very long. This is the kind of thing that I expect to catch on cable after midnight, not as something starring Russell Crowe and playing in thousands of theaters. It’s not something that you will regret watching, but it is almost aggravatingly mediocre.
A down-on-her-luck single mom is driving her son to school one day when she loses her patience with an inattentive driver (Crowe) and cuts him off. Unfortunately for her, the other driver is an even more down-on-his-luck psychopath that decides that this is enough reason to stalk her and murder her friends and family. It’s a basic and confined story, taking place during a single day, that is basically a cat-and-mouse scenario with these two characters. I guess it’s also a cautionary tale about the need to treat others with decency and patience. Or else they will murder you.
The comparison that I’ve often heard is that Unhinged is a cross between Duel and Falling Down. That’s kinda true, but it’s more accurate to say that this film is halfway between Duel and Falling Down, which allows it to invoke both of those films without the elements that make either of them work. Unhinged tries to have its cake and eat it too by presenting the villain as a normal guy that has snapped, while also making him so extreme that he seems inhuman in his single-minded assault over a minor slight. In attempting to hit both ends up the spectrum, the villain lacks both the every-man sympathy of Michael Douglas in Falling Down and the anonymous terror of the unseen trucker in Duel. The movie just doesn’t seem to know what to do with its own villain, which makes him completely forgettable for the audience.
I’m also not sure what the movie expects me to think of the villain. I think we have all been at the point when we are sitting in traffic during our daily commute and weighing the pros and cons of driving straight into oncoming traffic instead of going into work, then somebody cuts you off for no reason and you consider following them home to kill their family and burn their fucking house to the ground while they watch and cry and you just laugh and laugh. We’ve all been there. But we don’t actually do it and it would take a lot to make us sympathetic if we did do it. This movie makes a couple of references to Crowe being divorced and losing his job and pension, and the writers seem to think that’s enough character development to make us understand him. It isn’t. There is no arc here; he begins and ends the film being completely evil. It would be like if Falling Down skipped the descent into madness and went straight to the ending where Michael Douglas is clearly the villain. I really don’t get what they were going for here, but I think they failed at whatever it was.
That being said, the performances are strong and there is some decent suspense to be found. Crowe is a scary, intense bastard. This makes me want to see him as a psycho in a better film because he is goddamn effective here. I’m also not sure if he has gained a lot of weight or he wore some kind of fat suit for this, but he is physically imposing and has a look in his eye like he is about to single-handedly storm Sparta when he’s responding to a minor traffic incident. I am unfamiliar with Caren Pistorius (though she was apparently in Mortal Engines), but she carries the film with minimal material to work with. I really felt bad for this lady, who is just having the worst fucking day ever in a series of shitty days, and was invested in her survival. Thanks to these performances, the film has genuine (if fleeting) suspense as you hope that this poor lady gets away from this maniac and gets her life back together. However, that is probably almost entirely a credit to the performances rather than the script.
Unhinged is worth checking one night when you come across it on cable or streaming or whatever, but it isn’t worth running out to the theater. It also feels like the kind of thing that will be on TNT every other day in a couple of years. In the meantime, check out Falling Down or Duel if you haven’t seen them (if you are unfamiliar with it, Duel was Spielberg’s first movie).
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhinged_(2020_film)#/media/File:Unhinged2020Poster.jpeg
