Review: Russell Crowe’s ‘Unhinged’ Lives Up To Its Title

The first wide theatrical release in America since the lock down is an unapologetically nasty and relentless grind house thrill ride. If you loved Duel, The Hitcher and Joyride, you’ll at least tolerate Unhinged.

Unhinged, which has been playing overseas for the last month and opens in America on Friday, isn’t the great cinematic triumph of our time. That this unapologetic grindhouse exploitation flick, as opposed to the $200 million glory that is (allegedly) Chris Nolan’s Tenet, is the movie welcoming Americans back to the multiplexes is a cosmic joke on the highest order. We wanted wonder women bending time, super-spies risking it all for “family” and candy men flying into the danger zone. Instead we’ve got a heavy-set and perpetually grouchy Russell Crowe running people over with his car in a quest to avenge his emasculated (white) manhood.

Putting aside outside context, director Derrick Borte and screenwriter Carl Ellsworth’s Unhinged is an agreeably mean and pleasantly foul bit of pulp fiction. Ellsworth has a solid resume with thrillers like Disturbia, the (pretty good) Last House on the Left remake and Wed Craven’s dynamite Red Eye (which turns 15 tomorrow). It’s the Rachel McAdams/Cillian Murphy thriller, about a young woman stuck on an airplane with a passenger who very much intended to sit next to her, that comes to mind since the structure is almost identical.

After a prologue that cues our interest, we get 20 minutes of character work and table-setting before our female protagonist (a newly divorced single mother played by Caren Pistorius) runs headfirst into danger, at which point the movie-as-advertised kicks into gear. We get a solid hour of “the thing we came to see” before the film comes to a frenetic climax. Back in my day, we called that a “movie” and we watched these “movies” in large auditoriums with giant screens and speakers all around the room called “movie theaters.”

Unhinged is not as tight (or, all due respect, anywhere near as good) as the infamously short (76 minutes plus credits) Red Eye, but it gets the scrappy job done just the same. The prologue in this case sees Crowe’s Tom Cooper sitting outside a house stewing in his own misery before he steps out of his car, waltzes into the residence and hammers its occupants to death before burning the place down. It’s a hell of a hook, but it robs us of some of the (alleged) surprise that Pistorious’ stressed and stretched-thin Rachel feels when she realizes that guy from the earlier traffic confrontation isn’t about to live and let live.

Granted, if you’ve seen “Joker’s Favor” (my pick for the best-ever episode of Batman: The Animated Series), you probably weren’t surprised when the random passerby cussed out by Charlie Collins turned out to be the Clown Prince of Crime. Nor will anyone seeing the poster for Unhinged be shocked when Tom finally loses it and… egad! While the Joker spared Charlie’s life in exchange for a future favor, Tom has no such forward-thinking ideas. He’d rather embark on a relentless crusade of murder and mayhem directed at Rachel and anyone unlucky enough to try and help.

The violence is clinical and brutal as Tom uses what he discovers about his hapless victim to torment and/or attack her loved ones and friends in a skewed game of “Manners maketh man.” Tom certainly looks, sounds and acts like a “Men’s Rights Activists” spokesperson, and the film veers a little too close to slightly sympathizing with his disproportionate response. The film opens with a montage of folks losing their temper and lashing out, and the film almost argues that such confrontations are an inevitable result of modern society.

Moreover, we get plenty of tidbits showing off how unhinged in her own self-sabotaging way out hero happens to be, which are fair game in terms of establishing character but are just the sort of tidbits that might play badly to the “Skylar White was the real villain” crowd. That’s not necessarily the movie’s fault, as I don’t think movies, especially R-rated ones aimed at adults, need characters to proudly proclaim that the villain’s monologues are morally incorrect, but I’d be lying if I didn’t wonder in retrospect how much Ellsworth actually agreed with Cillian Murphy’s “men are logical, women are emotional” monologues from the Craven-directed airplane thriller.

That all being said, Unhinged is going to make its fortune (or not) over whether audiences get their money’s worth in terms of watching Oscar-winning actor (and periodic musician) Russell Crowe completely snap and cause $33 million worth of property damage and human carnage. Unhinged gives you exactly what’s promised. It delivers several genuinely tense confrontations, suspenseful in that Stephen King kinda way as in you know the terrible thing is going to happen but wait for the proverbial bomb to go off. And you get several extended vehicular chases and confrontations that put that “This is a real movie!” budget to real use.

The picture bounces between Tom being a blunt object of unstoppable rage and being a calculated criminal mastermind, and yes there’s a bit of luck in terms of how he is able to do what he does for as long as he does. I’m personally partial to a tense conversation whereby our villain forces our hero to pick someone, anyone, out of her contact list to be murdered in exchange for sparing loved ones, and it’s probably the closest the movie ever gets to really playing with its premise in a “What would you do?” sense.

Unhinged is not so much “good” as it is both “well-made and “well-acted” and “gleeful disreputable.” That second and third act is mostly a nuts-and-bolts exploitation fable about a young woman who pisses off the wrong guy and tries to get out alive.  You can dissect the politics, either as a “This is why women laugh at your unfunny jokes!” screed or as a “Gosh, I can’t blame him!” apologia, or you can enjoy the hammy carnage.

It’s the kind of mid-to-low budget, star-driven, concept-specific studio programmer that used to be Hollywood’s bread-and-butter. Crowe is having a blast here as the bruised forearm thriller lives up to its title. Its existence as the accidental theatrical savior (or at least sacrificial lamb) is yet another cruel irony in a year filled with such. Unhinged, sans franchise aspirations, cross-platform exploitation or nostalgic IP exploitation, is what we used to call “a movie.” Unhinged may not be the cinema we wanted, but it’s the cinema we deserve.