Unhinged

Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.

It’s all over the front page, Russell Crowe gets road rage in this B-movie thriller. Casting from real life, there.

He plays Tom Cooper, introducing himself to us by brutally killing his ex-wife and her new man. As the police hunt him, he’s cut up on the freeway by Caren Pistorius’ Rachel, rushing to get her kid to school while having a nightmare of a morning.

That turns into a nightmare of a day, as the unhinged boom title drop Cooper decides to teach Rachel a lesson, by going after and killing everyone Rachel loves, in a variety of nasty fashions, not purely vehicular.

It’s a silly B-movie concept, and delivers silly B-movie results. It’s predicated almost entirely on Crowe’s performance, which is every bit as chonky as the fat suit he inhabits for no reason whatsoever, and while as a gentleman of extraordinary stature myself I feel this is unwarranted cultural appropriation, it is enough to make a film that doesn’t have all that much going for it otherwise watchable.

A brainless bit of exploitation, so if you’re in the mood for that give it a bash, but it’s not essential viewing by any stretch.