Unhinged

After a confrontation with an unstable man at an intersection, a woman becomes the target of his rage.

Academy Award-winner Russell Crowe stars in Unhinged, a psychological thriller that takes something we've all experienced road rage to an unpredictable and terrifying conclusion.

Rachel (Caren Pistorius) is running late getting to work when she crosses paths with a stranger (Crowe) at a traffic light.

Soon, Rachel finds herself and everyone she loves the target of a man who feels invisible and is looking to make one last mark upon the world by teaching her a series of deadly lessons.

What follows is a dangerous game of cat and mouse that proves you never know who you're driving next to.

Unhinged (2020)
R | 1h 30min | Action, Thriller

Stars: Russell Crowe, Caren Pistorius, Jimmi Simpson
Director: Derrick Borte
Writer: Carl Ellsworth

Unhinged | Official Trailer

REVIEW: Unhinged

Russell Crowe gives a highly credible impression of a rampaging grizzly bear in Unhinged. With revenge on his mind, he's stalking a single mother after she's been reckless enough to sound her car horn at him at a green light. First, he demands an apology. Then he resorts to murder.

He's a more primal adaptation of The Angry White Male, a species memorably brought to the screen by Michael Douglas in 1993 when he was still polishing his career as a controversialist. In the Joel Schumacher thriller Falling Down he played a chronically outraged character identified only as The Man.

Divorced and jobless, The Man is harbouring a grudge against a system that he sees as being relentlessly stacked against him. But the film's most contentious facet lies in the fact that you're encouraged to see his point of view. He's equipped with a veneer of rationalism bolstered by the fact that his main targets are even more obnoxious than he is. There are a couple of young Hispanic gangsters who try to mug him after he's strayed on to their turf and a neo-Nazi who takes him for a fellow racist. Big mistake. The Man is less discriminating than any bigot. He's against all those who offend his uniquely skewed sense of propriety and his passion for individual rights. And there are a lot of them.

In contrast, Tom Cooper, Crowe's version of the breed never really explains himself. We know that he can't stand anyone who tries to get the better of him in an argument and that he hates women and the divorce lawyers who help them get what they want from their ex-husbands. Otherwise, he has all the emotional complexity of an unusually alert and fast-moving zombie.

The screenplay is by Carl Ellsworth, who began his career in feature films collaborating with Wes Craven, a master when it comes to sustained suspense, but this time Ellsworth's script-writing talents begin to fray pretty quickly under the strain of prolonging the mayhem. You're not far in before you're pushed to the conclusion that suburban New Orleans, where the film was shot, must have the doziest police force in the world.

In the opening scene, Cooper begins as he means to go on by taking an axe to the front door of his ex-wife's house then doing the same to its occupants before torching the place. It seems that the police soon fix on him as the culprit yet the next morning, he's still at large, driving the same car. It's at this point that Rachel Hunter (New Zealand actor Caren Pistorius) is unfortunate to cross his path while taking her son, Kyle (Gabriel Bateman) to school.

First, he chases her car, subjecting her to a protracted and inventive demonstration of road rage. Then, in a manoeuvre so nifty that I'm still trying to work it out, he steals her 'phone. Now he has access her life and everybody in it and the casualty rate begins to rise very swiftly.

Ellsworth and the director, Derrick Borte, make a perfunctory stab at turning it into a morality tale for our times with an opening montage pointing up the prevalence of random acts of violence born of uncontrollable rage, and Crowe has backed up this point of view with interviews for the film. But its main business lies in action and the mechanics of maintaining the momentum.

Pistorius' performance, however, does inject some much needed humanity into the piece. No matter how many ill-advised moves the script forces her to make, you're on her side and Crowe summons up such an abundance of raw energy and concentrated fury that he's truly terrifying.

It's far from being great film-making but if you have a vicarious taste for orchestrated chaos, this is the movie.

By Sandra Hall smh.com.au