Review: Unhinged (2020)

There’s a venerable tradition in Hollywood where great dramatic actors get bloated as hell or skinny as a rail to prove how serious they are in a given on-screen performance. Perhaps the best demonstration of this is Robert De Niro’s transformation over the course of Raging Bull, where De Niro gained 60 pounds to end the film as a sad, puffy fat man doing Marlon Brando impressions at a club. Well, we may have a new contender for most bloated acting on screen with Russell Crowe in Derrick Borte’s Unhinged, the sadistic exploitation thriller that was one of the few films to be released in theatres in late summer 2020.

In Unhinged, Russell Crowe plays Tom Cooper, a raging, snorting, huffing, puffing sack of angry male rage who goes on a rampage to “prove a point.” In the opening moments of the film, we watch him pop pills inside his hulking pickup truck before going into the suburban home of his ex-wife and viciously killing her and her boyfriend with a hammer. He burns down the house and drives away. Crowe’s Cooper is male rage personified, the kind of man we hear about on the news who got fed up with family members or coworkers and decided to kill himself while taking down as many people with him as he could. To solidify the connection, the opening credits feature news footage and grainy smartphone videos of road rage incidents across the United States. Clearly, these opening credits say, such incidents are hardly rare.

But don’t let the broad gestures at social criticism trick you into thinking that Unhinged is about anything more than the thrill of watching Caren Pistorius’s Rachel Flynn try to escape the deranged attention of Crowe’s Tom Cooper. This is exploitation cinema through and through, using references to real life problems to justify 93 minutes of hardcore action. Once Rachel meets Tom at a stoplight and incenses him by honking at him to get moving, the film becomes a non-stop barrage of escalating chases and showdowns. Crowe’s Cooper projects all his misogynistic rage onto Rachel, and from then on he’s content to murder her friend, hold her brother hostage, and run over any good samaritan than gets in his way.

Viewers who like their thrillers dark and dirty will appreciate the grisly violence on display. There are plenty of car crashes—real ones, too, not just CGI models exploding in weightless abandon—and vicious beatings and surprising moments of explosive violence. Throughout it all, Crowe howls and threatens and sweats buckets and stares daggers over the steering wheel of his behemoth truck. Crowe gained weight for the role and the bloat of his fingers and nose makes him look like a man who has already eaten and drank himself to oblivion, even if his bulging gut is supplemented by costume padding. Director Derrick Borte and his cinematographer Brendan Galvin love to use wide angle lenses placed on the dashes of cars to shoot cutaways during the chase scenes. The fish-bulb effect of the lens exaggerates the width of Crowe’s face and accentuates his derangement on screen. The total effect is rather terrifying, and Crowe is absolutely committed to the titular nature of his character.

Perhaps the idea of watching a film about a homicidal maniac terrorizing people in his vehicle hits too close to home these days, and viewers would be excused at finding the film tasteless. But exploitation is always tasteless. It’s provocative and violent entertainment that uses the pains of reality to fuel the thrills of the silver screen. Good taste and moral entertainment don’t even come into consideration with films of this sort. Thus, Unhinged is a perfectly adequate work of exploitation filmmaking. Whether you appreciate that kind of filmmaking is up to you entirely.

6 out of 10

Unhinged (2020, USA)

Directed by Derrick Borte; written by Carl Ellsworth; starring Russell Crowe, Caren Pistorius, Gabriel Bateman, Jimmi Simpson, Austin P. McKenzie.

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