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 ofUnhingedhas 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 thezeitgeistand strike box office gold, somewhat like the wildly overratedFight Club(1999) apparently did for repressed masculinity.

ButFight Clubseems 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…