Movie Review : Unhinged (2020)
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Heart-Shaped Box is one of Nirvana’s greatest hits and it is memorable for plenty of reasons. Kurt Cobain’s bombastic chord progressions, the haunting chorus, but also because of its original subject matter. It’s about being in a relationship with someone who’s obsessed with you. It’s the evil twin of every mainstream rock song. It was a natural choice for the trailer of a movie about a lengthy, hyperviolent road rage incident like Unhinged. But it’s the best thing about it.
Unhinged tells the story of a young, overworked single mother (Caren Pistorius) who loses her shit at a man who stalls at a green light. Little did she know, the man (Russell Crowe) had just killed his wife and her lover the night before and was in the midst of a complete fucking breakdown. Drifting towards and a violent ending, the man decides to take this impolite young woman and everyone she loves with him. Because… I don’t know? Male power fantasy?
A bloated psychopath
Of course, the Heart-Shaped Box trailed caught my attention. But it’s not the only reason why I decided to watch Unhinged. I thought road rage was an interesting idea to make a film about. Because the freeway in a morally ambiguous place that makes everyone lose their shit eventually. But the road isn’t a character in this movie. The morals of Unhinged are set in the very first scene, when Russell Crowe sets his wife and her new boyfriend on fire.
This is pretty much the extent of the information you get about Crowe’s character. He lost his job, horribly murdered two people and now he’s a become an avatar of death itself. Unhinged doesn’t even acknowledge that the young mother was in the wrong first. She aggressively honks at him and refuses to apologize several times. She got called out on being shitty and became self-righteous about it, so now we’re supposed to empathize with her?
Unhinged also hints at the fact that she’s banging her divorce lawyer (the immortal Jimmi Simpson) for free counsel, like it’s supposed to demonstrate how sad and desperate she is. It would’ve been really easy to root for Russell Crowe’s character if he wasn’t this ugly, bloated and soulless monster. Unhinged is ultimately not a movie about road rage at all. It’s just one of these generic women in jeopardy films that came thirty years too late.
There is something mysterious to Russell Crowe’s character that is not explored at all.
Missed opportunities
What makes Unhinged such a frustrating movie is that it had the potential to be smart and interesting. To be a commentary on our overwhelming way of life. There’s a Falling Down type moral drama hidden in there that went completely unnoticed by screenwriter Carl Ellsworth. We needed to know more about Russell Crowe’s character and less about Caren Pistorius’. She needed to be more of an undeserving victim than what she turned out to be.
I’m not searching to absolve the man and incriminate the woman here. But you can’t enforce a good vs evil confrontation onto every situation. Crowe is supposed to be a frustrated, heartbroken man. Not Ted Bundy. Even if his character is 100% despicable, he’s still the most watchable part of Unhinged, though. There’s a weird, latent sadness and resignation to his violence, like he always knew he would end up being the bad guy of the story.
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Should you watch Unhinged? There are some tense action sequences that are worth your time, I guess. There are not emotional stakes to it, because you know right off the bat who’s the character who burned other human beings alive and who didn’t. It’s a technically competent movie that doesn’t have a soul. There is no one to love or to invest yourself emotionally in. It’s the kind of movie that might find a cult audience through a drinking game.
4.9/10
