UNHINGED: A Rousing and Rusty Thriller

There’s a timid tinge to a thriller that tries to evoke fear and stress from modern times, yet spends more time finding cool stuff to stage around than offer any insight. Unhinged falls in line with many thrillers of the sort, taking its atmosphere out of a chaotic Louisiana and settling in for violent theatrics. For such simple ambitions, I can’t fault the film for delivering on its promised intensity. Yet I can’t quite tear myself away from the prospect that this film seems to start saying something and merely turns that something into a one-liner.

Tense Times

It’s perhaps a poor choice for the film to spend so much time holding our hand. The opening titles boast a montage of real-world footage that lets us know America is in a terrible spot. Tensions are high, crime is rising, cops are few, and everybody is just really on edge. Don’t get your hopes up about this film being some commentary on the disconnect in the human nature of divisive times. The film is merely trying to set the stage to accept the rage and schemes that’ll follow.

We’re then given introductions almost too elaborate for our hero and villain. We learn early that the pudgy and haggard Tom (Russell Crowe) is a violent mess of a man long before his run-in the protagonist. We’re filled in on the entire situation of the struggling single-mom Rachel (Caren Pistorius). She’s divorced, struggling to pay for her house, struggling to find a job, and struggling to keep a schedule. Nothing is going right in her life and we already know her meeting with Tom will not go well when they meet in traffic.

Gear-Grinding Gridlock

The inciting incident occurs when Tom refuses to move his truck at a green light during morning traffic. She honks at him and decides to go around him. Angered by Rachel’s refusal to apologize, Tom decides to tailgate her. He’ll later find out more about Rachel’s life and start tracking down and murdering her contacts. Rachel, a desperate mess, will go from being horrified and tearful to angry and vengeful, although the scenes with her son are surprisingly endearing.

In between all the shouting over phones and acts of violence, Tom will often sputter into a drug-induced rant about the state of the world. He’ll fill his rampage with dialogue croutons of how nobody has accountability and that women can’t be trusted in marriages. Any moments of finding some more to the story behind Tom’s crazed mental state is quickly struck down with more reasons to hate him than to understand fully where he came from. This, too, applies to Rachel, who is at one point asked by Tom if he’s been sleeping with her married lawyer and she doesn’t give a firm answer. She’ll later ask Tom about his family life and he won’t really answer. So I guess we’ll just settle for them to be standard hero and villain, leaving all moral ambiguity at the door.

Simple Thrills

Once one can distance themselves from the lacking highlight on society’s troubles, there are still some bright spots for being little more than a mindless shot of adrenaline. This is most present during the car chases which are few yet finely crafted. When accidents occur, they’re exceptionally brutal. People are not just run over but smashed by cars with such force and surprise worthy of a wince. When a truck smashes into a car, it obliterates the smaller vehicle into shreds of metal. Considering how spaced out these moments were, they’re genuine surprises.

The non-car violence also goes for the jugular. Tom becomes such a vicious killer, getting creative with everything from knives to coffee cups. His inevitable match with Rachel gets very physical and has a lot of poundings and stabbings that are strangely exhilarating. The construction of these scenes is so well done it’s almost enough to overlook the predictable thriller format. Almost.

Flounderingly Familiar

These very scenes come about by the predictable bubbling of banter that either resort to exposition to make to the plot technologically sound or one-liners of anger and rage. When Crowe isn’t growling in his kinda-sorta Louisiana accent that he thankfully seems to drop, Pistorius only has the three modes of well-meaning mom, tearful victim, and enraged woman pushed too far. When she speaks back against her attacker, it’s a whole lot of standard revenge growling, leading to the film’s one-liner climax clincher that is going to be instantly forgettable.

Trying to keep this thriller believable enough, the film goes out of its way to both pose limitations and setup hindrances. This sometimes leads to subversions as with Rachel’s car being so old we think it’ll break down or prevent her from escaping Tom, but this doesn’t happen. Other times, however, it pulls a lot of ridiculous twists out of its bag. After what seems like a minute of Rachel being away from her car, Tom is able to not only swipe Rachel’s smartphone but is made instantly aware of all her electronic wireless devices, including ones we don’t even know about. The mind reels at what Tom could stage within an hour, considering he spends most of the film blinded by anger and high on pills.

Conclusion

Unhinged remains so stuck in first gear it rarely veers out of the thriller slow lane. Though far from the worst for its bursts of brutality, there’s so little that is taken advantage of in its societal influence that makes it all the more disappointing for retreating to the simplistic. It’s hard to pull for the picture when we’re rooting for Rachel to survive her encounter and her ultimate lesson she learns, in the end, is to not honk at motorists in traffic. But is that really such a good lesson? For a woman who is going through a divorce, financial issues, and stressed out of her mind, honking in traffic doesn’t even seem worthy of a shouting match, much less having her friends and family murdered.

By the time the film reaches this finale, however, it’s forgotten all that yammering about infidelity, financial struggles, and family issues. It’s somewhat fitting as, after all the car crashes and violent showdowns, audiences will probably forget about Unhinged, remembering it more as that one film with an overweight and murderous Russell Crowe.

What did you think of Unhinged? Was it a good fit for Russell Crowe? Let us know in the comments below!

Unhinged was released in cinemas in the US on August 21, 2020.

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