Russell Crowe Is Truly Unhinged In This Nasty Prime Video Thriller
Chad Collins
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Derrick Borte’s Unhinged targets the core of what made the best 90s horror thrillers work. It’s a lean, mean, vehicular machine, a thriller imbued with so much nihilistic nastiness, it’s not just an attitude; it’s Unhinged’s reason to be. A psychothriller with grit, it cultivates heart-pounding suspense and electric urgency, subjecting the denizens of its world to all manner of savagery before the car stops and the ride is over.
Scripted by Carl Ellsworth, Unhinged’s moderate box office success ($44 million worldwide) is likely attributed to Ellsworth’s high concept antics (Unhinged is road rage, R-rated) and Unhinged’s dishonor of being the first wide theatrical release following the COVID-19 pandemic. Released in over 1,800 theaters in August 2020, Unhinged found an audience, one likely unaware that, principally, the movie was about them.
Opening with reels of road rage, unrest, and domestic malcontent, Unhinged’s culled from real-life footage of crashes, riots, fights, and anger complements competing voiceovers. The world is angry. People are selfish. No one cares about anyone but themselves. This opening is a little on the chafed, carnage-heavy nose, though it does its job well, augmenting its version of New Orleans as a kind of reality-adjacent cesspool. It’s every man (or single mother) for themselves.
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Rachel Flynn is in the midst of a divorce. The audience knows this because there’s a book about helping children cope on her coffee table. She’s tired, overworked, and overwhelmed, though she does a better job than most at keeping it together. Her ennui and existential angst are internalized. Rarely, if ever, does she externalize it. As she gets her son Kyle (Gabriel Bateman, Child’s Play) ready for school, background news reports detail the violent murder of a woman and her boyfriend. The suspect? The female victim’s ex-husband, Tom Cooper (Russell Crowe).
Crowe, no differently than he’s done with streaming sensation The Pope’s Exorcist, brings a kind of B-movie gravitas to the role. He’s a broken, worn-down man, though rather than simply ham it up, Crowe—an Oscar winner—delicately balances the manic frothing with earnest anger. Rachel makes the mistake of honking at Tom after he fails to go when the light turns green. He pulls up alongside her, demanding an apology. Wisely (and unwisely) Rachel declines. She didn’t do anything wrong. Certifiably furious, Tom spends the remainder of Unhinged tracking her down, killing bystanders and family members alike to show Rachel what a “bad day” really looks like.
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The gender ideology is incidental, though no less resonant on account of that. Unhinged, despite its schlock-fest origins, interrogates longstanding social norms, uncomfortably questioning whether Rachel should disingenuously apologize or risk incurring an embittered, entitled man’s wrath. There’s no movie if Rachel doesn’t opt for the latter, though Ellsworth and Borte are firmly on her side. Rather than being a trite cautionary tale of bad decisions gone awry, Rachel is never anything less than sympathetic. Tom was wrong. Obviously for the murder of his ex-wife, but just as much for driving irresponsibly. Rachel simply honked at him. Tom’s rage was the impetus, not the honk.
In a culture of powder keg tempers, Unhinged largely makes the case that the people we run afoul of—especially the men women run afoul of—are unknowns. The guy you honk at might be a serial killer just as easily as he might be an old woman en route to the Piggly Wiggly. As an embellished thriller, equal parts The Hitcher and Duel, it’s got to be the serial killer here, and Crowe delivers.
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Unhinged’s violence hurts. Tonally, Fatal Attraction and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle are clear influences. Those domestic thrillers were cautionary odysseys with horror gore. Here, car chases are just as regularly swapped for public executions and home invasion suspense. The police writ large are useless, and as the bodies pile up, Rachel fully embodies the final girl mythos, having had enough of Tom’s games. At one point he remarks, “Rachel has dismissed me as the unworthiest f*** to ever walk this planet,” and she has—and she should.
While not a classic by any means, Unhinged is the kind of mean-spirited thriller we don’t get enough of nowadays. It’s handsomely filmed, plenty nasty, and even acts as an origin for the kind of late-game Russell Crowe I can’t get enough of these days. He’s in full gonzo mode, lending credibility to some of the genre’s hoariest cliches. That Unhinged also has something of note to say—entitled men behaved badly because we keep letting them get away with it—is an extra bonus. The movie is presently streaming on Prime Video, and if you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, I encourage you to. It’s a ride well worth taking.
Categorized:Editorials
