IN THEATRES: Unhinged

On a bad day, single mother Rachel (Caren Pistorius) gets on the wrong side of another driver (Russell Crowe), who turns his sights on destroying everything she holds dear. 

Race with the Devil, Road Games, Breakdown, Duel... 

There have been some great thrillers involving cars. I have a soft spot for this type of movie - there is something so stripped down and visceral about limiting the story to the road. 

I do not watch trailers, but I caught a snippet of Unhinged and I got excited. Crowe's casting sounded good (and almost a comment on his real-life actions), and the film looked like unpretentious fun.

Unhinged rides the line between a character study of the motivations that turn men into spree killers and a trashy slasher. The filmmakers' inability to figure out which side to lean on means the film is completely unremarkable. I was struggling to remember it half an hour after leaving the theatre.

The film tries to contextualise Crowe's Tom Cooper as a man broken by the rat race and America’s healthcare crisis. However, the character is so cartoonishly evil in his ability to destroy the protagonists’ life that it is hard to buy.

Crowe does a good job in the early scenes, playing Cooper's simmering rage just right. 

But once the chase begins, his performance begins to feel silly, all the nuance shaved and moulded to fit the generic villain template.

The big problem with Unhinged is how rote and unoriginal it is. From beginning to end, nothing about Unhinged feels fresh or surprising. It does not help that the movie is dour.

Not that this movie should be light in tone, but there is such unrelenting meanness - and a predictability to the thriller mechanics - that make it kinda bland. There is a consistent grimness to a lot of average thrillers nowadays - I felt it with some of the Screen Gems and Blumhouse movies I have seen -  and Unhinged falls into the same mire.

I watched a TV movie a couple months ago with a similar premise. Entitled Death on the Freeway, it is about a serial killer in a van who waits until he gets cut off by a woman driver and then will try to run her off the road. even though it is directed by Hal Needham (Smokey and the Bandit) that movie actually found a way to write a thriller that had a good sense of suspense AND made the villain's actions part of a broader commentary on the misogyny the lead character faces. 

Compared to that movie, Unhinged is a leaden mess that lacks the intelligence to integrate and expand upon its themes, rather than use them as a jumping-off point for generic plot mechanics.