Unhinged was most famous this year for being one of the first movies to release in cinemas following the initial lockdown due to Covid-19, as well as being the movie where Russell Crowe does bad-guy, the unhinged antagonist of the title, intent on bringing vengeance to a single mother who has pissed him off at a set of traffic lights in downtown New Orleans in rush hour.
Crowe is always watchable in almost anything he’s done in his multiple-decade career, and his cinematic magnetism is on show here as he goes full-on bad guy as Tom Cooper, who we meet in the opening scenes seemingly taking out his ex-wife and new lover in a rather shocking initial attack in American suburbia. The pre-title violence is nothing compared to what’s to come, as we soon meet Rachel Flynn (Caren Pistorius), a twenty-something single mother who has also gone through a break-up, newly divorced and living with her younger brother (Austin P. McKenzie). We learn she has a son, Kyle (Gabriel Bateman), clinging onto custody and a job – just about, though is haemorrhaging clients due to her time-keeping and ability to balance her hectic life. On the school run one morning, Rachel finds herself stuck behind Cooper’s dusty pick-up and, when he fails to pull away from a junction promptly, honks her car horn repeatedly at him – something that pushes the man on the edge over the edge. What follows in 90-minutes of cat and mouse thrills as Cooper, a man with nothing to lose relentlessly peruses Rachel all over town intent on inflicting pain on her and everyone she knows.
If you take Unhinged at face value, you’ll have a good time with it. While nasty in places, the film has elements of the forgotten thrillers of the seventies and eighties – a movie that can be summed up by saying it sits somewhere between Spielberg’s Duel and Joel Schumacher’s pissed-off-pedestrian thriller Falling Down, albeit not quite boasting the same sort of quality as those two flicks.
Crowe is great as the unbalanced Cooper, and it is great to see him play a completely different role to his usual fare. While the film did play in cinemas, its second release on the smaller screen could ironically be where it is more suited – a highly polished B-movie perfect for those late Friday evenings with a pint and and a plate of whatever takes your fancy at the end of a tense week. Be warned – this is an extremely violent movie, supremely nasty in places, and some cheesy dialogue aside, manages to deliver on what it sets out to achieve. The box carries with it the tagline ‘It could happen to anyone’, and all good thrillers set themselves up with something that indeed could – like a getting bitten by a shark in the ocean, a knife attack in a hotel room, or, in this case, a relentless pursuer on the highway – but I didn’t particularly feel much tension and was never on the edge of my seat.
That said, this is a fairly generic, but tightly paced 90 minutes of carnage that should find the right audience at home.
Unhinged is released on DVD EST, VOD, DVD, BLU-RAY and iTunes in 4k on 23 November 2020.
Unhinged
Summary
An entertaining commentary and informative featurette add to a DVD release worthy of the price tag, though I suspect Unhinged to be more as a ‘one and done’ experience for most audiences.
