'Unhinged': An Odious Mix Of ‘Falling Down,’ ‘Joker’ & Toxically Violent American White Males [Review]

Like a crude and profane marriage between “Falling Down” and “Joker,” movies about aggrieved and disenfranchised American white men seemingly justified with their rage about a cruel and unfair world, director Derrick Borte’s reminiscent revenge thriller “Unhinged” is deeply misguided. “Unhinged” wants to map a similar Venn diagram sweet spot where the Worst Day Ever , a cruel lack of empathy, and selfish incivility trigger a point-of-no-return path to unholy violence and retribution. Instead, “Unhinged,” which desperately wants you to believe it has something meaningful to say about the toxic state of the world, quickly becomes tortuously overwrought, losing its way in a sweaty, grunting mess of gratuitous violence, nasty malice, and nauseating brutality making for one of the worst movies of summer 2020.

Borte opens the eerily prescient thriller with an alarming and recognizable portrait of America in chaos and distress—cable news montages depicting the collapse of a nation through furious street protests, stories of financial anguish, road rage clashes, police brutality, supermarket fights, self-centered social media narcissism, and a wave of resentful anger that plagues our society.

He then charts a contrived collision course between two anguished souls in the midst of deep personal crises —and in a blundering miscalculation— tries to afford them equal amounts of sympathy in their hour of need. The protagonist and victim is Rachel (Caren Pistorius, from “Slow West,” who deserves much better), a time-management challenged single mom going through a difficult divorce and financial hardship. Like many struggling people today, Rachel is barely keeping her head above water, juggling the increasing costs of her ailing mother’s healthcare, and the possibility of being fired by her best client. Terminally late and justifiably angry and stressed out, while trying to get her son Kyle (Gabriel Bateman) to school on time in bumper-to-bumper L.A. traffic, she lashes out, honking violently—and rudely—at a giant monster truck from hell that fails to accelerate at a green light and speeds past in a huff. Unfortunately for her, she’s honked at the wrong irrational man and triggered the road rage to end all road rage.

Because as “Unhinged” has already depicted in a ridiculous prologue, Tom Cooper’s (Russell Crowe), worst day ever beats Rachel’s by a mile. In fact, enduring his own nasty divorce, the substance-abusing Cooper starts his film day by bludgeoning his wife and her lover to death followed by torching their home. He’s a psychopath and subtly is not part of the “Unhinged” language.

So, Cooper, deeply offended, promises to unleash all hell on Rachel to make her atone for her rudeness when she fails to apologize for her minor road offense. “That’s where we are in the world today,” he monologues to her in a sermon of poisonous fury. “We’ve seen to have developed the fundamental inability to apologize to anyone for everything.” Without the apology he feels he’s owed, Cooper goes postal and “Unhinged” then abandons all its seemingly interesting ideas of interrogating our cultural age of incivility and discourtesy, favoring the vulgar and odiously violent instead.

Instead of diving into the unreasonable horror of road rage, or trying to say something about entitlement and toxic misogyny, Carl Ellsworth‘s script for “Unhinged” always implies a loathsome “both sides” approach to culpability in this drama, often suggesting perhaps none of this unwarranted violence would have occurred had Rachel only been kinder, less rude, and apologized. The film acknowledges Rachel has hit rock bottom, but it doesn’t offer her much sympathy when her stress causes her to be late for certain things — at one point, a friend responds to her request to meet by asking if she’ll be there in “human 20 minutes or Rachel 20 minutes?” It’s as if the movie is quietly building the case that Rachel, definitely a little bit more self-centered than she should be due to her struggles, deserves this pain.

Conversely, Crowe’s larger-than-life force of pure malevolence is often framed in a more sympathetic light like the moment he goes on a rant about the injustices that have besieged his unfortunate life (you can just picture the incels nodding along in agreement). Yes, he’s also portrayed as a hell on wheels demon of unremitting vengeance, killing innocent after innocent (in the most malicious ways), and his sense of entitlement is obviously misplaced. But the film can’t help itself in trying to explain or justify his rage—whether it’s because his wife was unfaithful to him or that he was unceremoniously fired from his job. It doesn’t matter that Tom commits heinous and violent crimes against women and those who try and stand up for them or support them because the film still suggests that men like Tom are also victims who get mistreated by the system. Thus he has a right to punish people for transgressions and sins? It’s never quite as pronounced as that, but the suggestions are dubiously put forth regardless.

In fairness, give Crowe full credit for committing to the role and delivering a believable portrayal of gross and entitled masculinity. His performance is terrifying, not just in moments of repulsive violence, but in the moments when he acts calm, genuinely believing he’s the nice guy in the room, despite his every growl and hiss demonstrating otherwise.

“Unhinged” is always unconvincing after the first act, but some of the ludicrous plot contrivances about stolen phones, hidden iPads, dead cell phone batters, and such, at the perfectly convenient moments to explain how Tom’s managed to find Rachel are just ridiculous and dumb. If the spiteful violence hasn’t turned you off midway, just wait until the ugly final act.

Watching Russell Crowe as a genuinely frightening villain sounds entertaining, but the bitterness and contempt seething through “Unhinged” is repellant enough to make you want to shower afterward. Borte’s movie seems interested, at first, at exploring toxic masculinity and the grievances of the American white male, but ultimately, the only thing “Unhinged” will achieve by playing in theaters is to get the audience to feel rage at the queasily vicious story they’ve experienced. [D+]

“Unhinged” is in theaters on August 21.