Unhinged Review – A Thriller Stuck in Neutral

Unhinged is the type of thriller designed to get the blood pumping. The villain is a crazed madman behind the wheel, the distressed hero a boiling pot pushed too far, and the atmosphere one of wracked tension. And while the film certainly does get the adrenaline flowing, it also drains the brain for an intriguing setup that never pays off.

Unorderly New Orleans

The setting at least has a unique build for never really amounting too much. The introduction comes with real-world footage of crimes and chaos. Voices of the news report on how crime has risen, people are on edge, and the police response is low. So it’s a bad time for everyone and the stage is set for someone to explode. Don’t get your hopes up, however, if you’re hoping for commentary. This film is about as insightful on the grind as Death Wish is on gun control.

This appeal is ruined before the intro credits, revealing that the overly bitter Tom (Russell Crowe) is a divorced guy who decided to kill his wife. We know he’s a bad guy who will probably kill again. We’re introduced to Rachel (Caren Pistorius) as a single mom with everything going wrong. Her divorce proceedings are bleeding her, job prospects are low, her car is aged, and she’s always late getting her son to school. By the time they collide in traffic, their thriller roles are pretty much written in stone.

Fast and Furious

As a thriller on, well, thrills alone, Unhinged certainly has the brutality. Tom is absolutely terrifying, even if Crowe’s first few scenes prove just how poorly he performs a New Orleans accent. With nothing to lose, he plows through traffic on his quest to make Rachel pay for…not apologizing for honking at him in traffic. To make her pay, he proceeds to murder her family and friends by going through her contacts.

He does so by ramming her car and zooming across streets, causing all manner of accidents. Though the car-based action is fewer than the adverts would infer, these sequences are rather surprising and violent. People are slammed into cars, automobiles roll off the road, and some just explode into smithereens. Even Tom’s rampage gets pretty bloody as the intensity mounts high with most scenes.

A Fumbling Falling Down

Had Unhinged been little more than just one mad man pursuing a struggling since mom, it’d be a fine bit of brainless thriller excitement. But what hinders such a film is the ramblings on societal ills that set the stage but exit quickly. Tom will be little more than our growling villain and Rachel our emotional hero.

There’ll no doubt be many comparisons to Falling Down for a similar establishing conflict as one man getting pissed off in traffic. Those comparisons will mostly end by the time Tom sets his murderous eyes on Rachel’s life. We learn a little more about his drive, feeling as though men are devalued in divorce proceedings. But just when we think there’s a bigger picture, as when Rachel asks if he has a family and he doesn’t answer, that character study is chucked out the window. Additionally, Rachel is questioned about her relationship with her chummy lawyer but also doesn’t give a firm yes or no. Any greater focus on their faults and their pains are reduced to shouts and showdowns by the third act.

The Slow Lane of Thrillers

It’s a real shame that this film is given so many opportunities to take aim at the pressures of our modern capitalist system and trades it in for thriller cliches. By the climax, Rachel lures Tom to a vacant home where all the pieces are in place for their duel, her son in tow to rescue. Even the obligatory one-liner arrives for the final blow, to be as forgettable as the film itself.

There’s an extra bitterness for a film such as this that tries too hard to ramp up our emotions. I felt for Rachel with her struggles of divorce and finances but those problems still remain by the end of the film. She does not deserve the torture she is delivered by Tom, who targets her contacts with stabbings and fire. So when the punchline scene of Rachel learning her lesson to not honk in traffic arrives, it feels cheap and gross that this is what we’re meant to walk out of the theater with.

A Familiar Route

When so many of the broader themes of such a film are neglected, the familiar thriller holes become all the more clear. Juggling a thriller on the road with screaming over the phone requires a lot of clever staging in order to make it all work. This film certainly puts some of the grunt work into making the thrills mildly plausible but not ironclad.

Consider how Tom is able to swipe Rachel’s phone in an extremely stealthy way. He not only knows where her phone is in her car but also her other phone and her iPad, both of which we don’t know about. This is fairly mild for a ludicrous hole in a thriller, yet it seems all the bigger from the gap in the film’s grander statement that merely rambles off into a mumbling rant.

Conclusion: Unhinged

It’s extra disappointing that Unhinged comes with hefty societal packaging only to be a mere ho-hum thriller when opened up. What starts with a satire simmering quickly evaporates into mindless violence, refusing to take the higher route it passes by. It would be nice to accept the picture as more escapism, paying more attention to its vibrant violence than its lacking insight. That goal can’t quite be reached when this thriller peppers in doses of real-world issues that are thrown out the window. It can’t be escapism if we can’t escape and Unhinged offers little shelter from the storm of 2020.

Did you see Unhinged? Was it an exciting thriller? Was it better than The Hunt? Let us know in the comments below.