“Unhinged” is directed by Derrick Borte and stars Academy Award Winning actor Russell Crowe. When Rachel (Caren Pistorius) is on her way to drop her child, Kyle (Gabriel Bateman), off at school and go to work, they get caught in traffic. She honks at a man (Crowe) stalled at a green light, who has not been having the best day. He becomes unhinged and starts to take it personally when she won’t apologize. He tracks her down until he gets his revenge.

I’m going to start off by saying this is a rough movie to get through, it definitely won’t be for everyone. In the opening scene, we see Crowe’s character, who’s only credited as “the man”, break into someone’s home and brutally murder them off screen. This happens a number of times throughout where the man kills innocent people over thoughts of assumptions. He constantly says he hasn’t been having a good day, but it isn’t the day that is being hard on him. It’s the actions and decisions he makes all throughout the movie by assaulting and consistently harassing our protagonists that leads to what he becomes. Road rage is one thing, but this man is just flat-out insane!

After the opening scene, which sets a very disturbing stage for the audience, it cuts to the opening credits over news footage of highways and the aftermaths of car crashes as if this is supposed to be a serious study of road rage. Clearly from the trailers and all the promotional interviews Crowe has done, it isn’t. There are many different thoughts going through my head as to why Crowe, a three-time Oscar nominee, would take on such an unlikable role as this one.

There aren’t any scenes that give any reason for you to feel empathy or get behind his reasoning, especially when he starts killing people again. There’s a scene at a diner where the man beats Rachel’s (Pistorius) divorce lawyer to death, amongst other graphic things, all because he wants her to understand what having a bad day is like. Later on, he breaks into Rachel’s home, where her brother, Fred (Austin P. McKenzie) and his girlfriend are. Just as in the diner scene, they die in an unnecessarily graphic fashion. There is an absurd amount of scenes that went too far over the line. I feel people really need to know what they’re paying to see. This diner scene was around 40 minutes in, I almost tapped out, and I have never walked out of a theater!

Had they not shown these scenes in such detail on screen for an extended period of time, I would’ve enjoyed the film much more than I did. Crowe does turn in an insanely entertaining performance, but as I said, this is a man you want to see caught. He doesn’t care whether he is caught or gunned down by the cops that day, he just wants to get through to this woman he’s only just met. The screenwriter Carl Ellsworth, who also wrote “Disturbia” and “Red Eye”, once again creates a very compelling villain. There’s a scene that was very tense when, after he takes Rachel’s phone and replaces it with a flip-phone, he calls the phone and asks her who he should kill next in her contacts, threatening to play Russian roulette. I did think that was a good, scary scene and a point where this movie realizes that you don’t need to have such extreme moments to make someone evil. Although, if Crowe wasn’t the one portraying him, this would be a straight-to-Blu-Ray movie you’d find at the bottom of the $5 bin at Walmart. 

The co-stars don’t help out that cause, particularly the main character who is played by Caren Pistorius. She is pretty much a no-name actor. She’s also made out to be quite stupid, which some people may find offensive, but you always have to have stupid people in slasher movies. Never have I seen a “final girl” in a slasher-type film be this stupid, Kyle (Bateman) even pleads to her to act nice to the man during their first encounter. She could’ve easily changed lanes at the intersection, one event that would easily make this whole movie irrelevant. Since that didn’t happen, had she been more apologetic a lot more people would be alive that day. All of the characters, in fact, make very stupid decisions: not calling 911, not putting on your seatbelt, not listening to smarter bystanders. 

The final act is where you really have to start suspending disbelief. About halfway through the man takes a bullet to the shoulder, creating a pretty severe gunshot wound. He is able to consistently hold his ground against this woman after she rams his car, flipping it 180 degrees, and hitting him with a golf club numerous times. This man seems to gain some sort of superhuman ability that makes the bullet wound seem like a paper cut. 

This movie dethroned Christopher Nolan for being the one to open theaters again. Do I think this will bring everyone back to theaters during a pandemic? No. Overall, this movie had a very good look to it; the car crashes looked believable instead of a CGI shlock fest. The score was better than it should have been. However, I can’t stress it enough, you need to know how intense and adult of a ride you’re walking into. 

Final Grade: C- (2.5/5)