Unhinged (2020): A Shallow One-Trick Pony

We've all been there before, angrily stomping on the accelerator to get away from that driver who honked at us for a little too long and gave us the finger for one reason or another, justified or not. Unhinged is a willing caricature of these usually forgettable encounters that ropes in escalating crimes of every severity, from road rage all the way up to capital murder. What it is not is varied or nuanced enough to make these despicable crimes land with anything other than a hollow sense of unease and disgust. Granted, some of its acting is very good, with Russel Crowe’s performance as the unstable Tom being a disturbing bright spot, fluctuating between barely controlled rage with a mask of civility and uncontrolled rage without it. Nevertheless, Crowe still can't save an underbaked screenplay that he is forced to succeed in spite of.

Unhinged is never an especially thoughtful movie, but it is always doing its best to make you sick to the pit of your stomach from the first opening credits to the final uninspired ending, which is topped off with a needle drop of Oyster Cult's vastly overused Don't Fear The Reaper. We're introduced to Tom before we even get to meet unsuspecting victim Rachel, as he commits breaking and entering, first-degree murder, and arson with the intent to hide the evidence within the first three minutes of the movie. Even the opening credits sing the same morbidly forceful tune as Tom, functioning as a slideshow of real-world road rage incidents, severely desaturated to make them look more serious, though I can't imagine why anyone would need to make real-world road rage look more serious than it already is. This movie wants so badly to be taken seriously, and while I won't call everything about it poorly done, it is cliched and visually forceful. I don't think it's unfair of me to criticize a B-movie like Unhinged for having the expected and formulaic flaws of a B-movie when good B-movies are supposed to overcome them.

Unhinged is little more than an hour and a half of young mother Rachel Hunter doing everything she can to evade the unstable Tom and his big, black pickup truck after a relatively minor encounter on the road, and despite its short runtime, the premise of this movie isn't enough to sustain it even close to all the way through. An angry driver serves as good fuel for a scene or even an act, but I kept waiting for Unhinged to introduce more shades to its story, and the tank was left unfilled. It is a one-trick pony pulling the same trick repeatedly and growing more urgent with each repetition, and it gets tiring to watch once it becomes clear that it isn't interested in doing any new tricks or evolving into anything bigger. Unhinged is a horror movie in the sense that it forces us to confront our own worst tendencies, and it pushes those embarrassing memories of being rude to someone else on the road to their logical extremes. It's regularly stomach-churning stuff, but after all of the emotions have settled and all of the blood has pooled, it's also frustratingly shallow.

Unhinged is thirty minutes of premise inflated to three times the size it was meant to fill, and the gaps are there to be seen. This is a movie that comes up with one meaningful idea when it needs a dozen. Whenever it runs out of said ideas, it simply reaches for another violent thriller cliche to try and distract the audience from the fact that it's begun taking wild swings at its own story instead of something more beneficial, like thinking it through. It is so much fire and fury, without any nuance to temper it, and it burns out quickly while trying to convince us it hasn't. All the things that don't work about it get stretched out like silly putty to fill the runtime and ceaselessly repeated until the movie is blue in the face.

I'm all for B-movie premises, but I needed more from Unhinged. Not only did it run out of ideas quickly, but it also failed to come up with more. This madman chasing a poor woman across the city only knows how to escalate his devious schemes to almost cartoonishly evil levels, but he does so in a predictable way that only challenges the stomach while leaving the mind untouched. Unhinged is rarely surprising, and it shocks in a way that becomes increasingly monotonous the longer it drags on, which isn't a good pronouncement for you when your movie is short. This is one attempt to shock the audience after another, and it's both too much and altogether not enough.

Unhinged - 4/10

Ecclesiastes 7:9