THE LONG ROAD TO HELL
Without exaggerating, the best thing about thriller Unhinged is the end credits
For this they reopened cinemas?
Russell Crowe stars as Man — hey, that’s what the end credits call him, and I was so happy when they started to roll — in Unhinged, a road rage thriller whose message seems to be: Be careful who you honk at.
The honker in question is Rachel (Caren Pistorius), a soon-to-be-single mom whose day is going pretty badly even before she crosses paths with Man. Late for work and for dropping her son at school, she gets stuck behind a Ford pickup that doesn’t budge when the light turns green.
Why does Man hate being honked at? I think John Locke may have answered that one in his 1688 work An Essay Concerning Anger in Carriages. Unhinged is vague on the point, except for the obvious fact that it’s not called Hinged.
The 90-minute film opens with a scene of Man murdering two people and burning down their house at 4 a.m. It’s irrelevant to what follows, though it does allow him to do a driving version of the ol’ walking-away-from-anexplosion-and-not-looking-back move.
Soon enough he meets Rachel in traffic, and the game is afoot. Or a-tire.
Man decides he’s going to hurt Rachel and everyone she knows. And a few people she doesn’t. And screenwriter Carl Ellsworth doesn’t waste time with extraneous plot points.
You can be certain that everything — everything! — introduced in the first half of the film will prove meaningful later. Candy-cane scissors, iphone without a password, Fortnight survival strategy — it’s all there. Might as well hang Chekhov’s gun rack on the back of Man’s truck.
Ellsworth has had an interesting career. After writing the so-so thriller Red Eye for Wes Craven in 2005, he fell into remakes
(The Last House on the Left, Red Dawn), ripoffs (Disturbia, a teen version of Rear Window) and sequels, including the recently announced Gremlins 3 — which, after this movie, I’m not looking forward to much.
Unhinged is technically an original story, though it may remind you of better rage movies (Changing Lanes, with Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson, is quite good) and road thrillers — Steven Spielberg’s debut feature Duel from 1971 remains a case study in how to do it right.
Part of the problem with this one is that nothing about the plot feels organic or real — things happen because they benefit the movie, not through anything related to the characters or their motivations.
Word is that Nicolas Cage was originally offered the part of Man and turned it down, which is odd because (A) it suggests Unhinged is a much better movie than it is, and (B) if you Google “Nicolas Cage unhinged” you’ll come upon numerous reviews and career retrospectives of the actor.
It’s as if you wrote Untitled Super-smart British Guy Biopic. You know Benedict Cumberbatch is going to star, probably opposite Keira Knightley.
Cage would no doubt have given the proper amount of
un-hinged-ness to Man. (Heck, I’d have cast him as Rachel if he wanted the part.) Crowe’s performance in comparison is all alliterative assonance. He glowers. He groans. He growls. And is that a grimace? He’s got more range than a Tesla!
Director Derrick Borte drives this damaged vehicle as well as he’s able, but it’s clearly a wreck waiting to happen.
The only reason I’m not giving this film the lowest score possible is that Pistorius does a decent job as Rachel, and because after the first hour, when she figures out a way to fight back, Unhinged becomes a decent revenge thriller — though I will add that she doesn’t earn that final-act zinger. And in any case, an hour is a long time for a movie to be stuck in idle. If ever there were a movie in need of a courtesy honk, Unhinged is it.