PLOT: A newly divorced single mother (Caren Pistorius) is in for the worst, and possibly last, day of her life when she unwittingly cuts off a homicidal motorist (Russell Crowe) with a deadly case of road rage.
REVIEW: UNHINGED has a great hook. Who hasn’t been, at one time or another, on the receiving end of some road rage? By the same token, who hasn’t occasionally had a little road rage of their own? When you’re driving along and suddenly feel the need to honk your horn at another driver, you never really know who’s behind the wheel of the vehicle you’re honking at, and UNHINGED exploits that fear is a fun, compact little thriller. It’s the first big mainstream film to hit theatres exclusively since the start of the pandemic, and it’s a fun one to welcome you back.
Director Derrick Borte and writer Carl Ellsworth’s biggest asset here is star Russell Crowe, playing wildly against type as the stranger Caren Pistorius’ Rachel cuts off. In some ways playing a turned-up, genre movie version of Michael Douglas’ D-Fens from the classic FALLING DOWN, Crowe’s newly laid-off worker is fresh off of murdering his ex-wife and her new partner, and is, in fact, on his way to commit suicide when Rachel makes the mistake of cutting him off. Devoted to teaching her one last lesson, over the next ninety minutes he hunts her like a dog through New Orleans, racking up a huge body count, and eliminating anyone she has any affection for whatsoever.
Crowe definitely seems to be having a ball playing against type, giving his character, Tom Cooper not only a real sense of menace, but a gleeful sadism. Yet, he also plays him as a very real world monster. It’s not hard to imagine a disenfranchised, deranged motorist doing some of the things he does to her in our era of random violence. He’s a very 2020-monster, made even more so by the fact that he truly believes he has some kind of moral high ground. He thinks he’s the one being wronged – not only by Rachel but by society at large.
While thoroughly Crowe’s show, Caren Pistorius is a likeable heroine. Borte makes a smart move by not making her too vanilla, in that she’s headstrong and when given the opportunity to diffuse the situation early on, before any of the violence starts, she tells Crowe’s character to “f**k off”. Pistorius is something of a newcomer but has the same regular person vibe Rachel McAdams did in the Ellsworth-written RED EYE.
UNHINGED is pretty intense throughout, earning it’s R-rating with some pretty graphic kills, such as when Crowe uses a coffee cup in a random act of violence to dispatch a would-be ally for Rachel. My only real issue with the film is that Crowe runs so amuck that I feel like there’s a smarter way this could have been depicted in our social media dominated landscape. This goes for an old-school vibe, where Pistorius is pitted squarely against the hulking Crowe, although in some ways this is refreshing as it feels like a vintage nineties-style thriller, a welcome return for this kind of movie. At ninety minutes, this is well-paced and exciting, although it remains to be seen whether or not audiences will turn out to see it all things considered. It’s too bad this is coming out in such a charged athmosphere, as had it come out in a pre-pandemic time it might have been a nifty little sleeper.