Unhinged (2020)

I’m sure we’ve all had occasion to engage in hand-to-hand combat on the highway, or resort to using our car as a weapon. But the writer of Unhinged has spent too much time surfing QuorTube, and concluded that road rage and serial killing are the same phenomenon. 

The obvious calculation behind this production is that hybridizing the plot of [TV movie] Duel (1971) with elements of Psycho (1960), and intermixing pop psychology notions about road rage and texting at the wheel—and various other societal ills—is going to tap into the zeitgeist and strike box office gold, somewhat like the wildly overrated Fight Club (1999) apparently did for repressed masculinity.

But Fight Club seems like a work of genius compared with this garbage, and even Russell Crowe—as a kind of Stuntman Mike without style—cannot save it. It’s a straight action-suspense effort in which the screenwriter deploys at best cursory knowledge of how human animals behave in real-world situations.

A glance at IMDb indicates that I have seen 10% of Crowe’s film output. He was brilliant in LA Confidential (1997), equally so playing introverted but relentless types in The Insider (1999) and American Gangster (2007), and perhaps also in any of the myriad ones I haven’t seen. He has amazing range.  Maybe he viewed this project as a way to counter South Park‘s on-the-money critique of his personality flaws …but doing so by sending himself up by way of an artless thriller seems kind of weird.