‘Unhinged’ review: Russell Crowe sweats and growls through this brutal road-rage thriller

Originally slated to be the movie that reopened theatres after months of lockdown before Train to Busan sequel Peninsula clawed its way in a week earlier, Unhinged would likely be a straight to video release in any other circumstance. That said, this ultra-violent Russell Crowe road-rage movie may be just the sort of mindless insanity theatergoers need right now.

Russell Crowe stars as an unnamed, extremely sweaty man at the end of his rope. The film opens in the immediate aftermath of him committing a brutal crime, so we know from the get-go that he’s already extremely unstable and dangerous. Meanwhile, across town, Rachel (Caren Pistorius) is a stressed mother trying to get her son Kyle (Gabriel Bateman) to school before an important work meeting. They leave the house late and encounter a huge traffic jam on the highway, so Rachel takes an exit into the city where fate brings her right behind Crowe’s character, sitting immobile in his truck at a green light. Already at the breaking point, Rachel honks loudly and exchanges words with Crowe, who pulls up alongside her and demands an apology.

Crowe explains with a restrained intensity that she should have given him a “courtesy tap” before leaning heavily on her horn. When Rachel refuses to engage with this clearly unhinged individual, Crowe begins tailgating her and threatening to make her pay for her transgression.

Unhinged works well in its opening moments, and creates a mounting sense of dread as Crowe and Rachel come head-to-head. The audience already knows how dangerous he is, yet Rachel remains blissfully unaware of what she’s getting herself into — it’s a perfect way to build tension and is extremely effective in those early scenes.

The problem is that Carl Ellsworth’s script doesn’t take this premise anywhere interesting. We know Crowe’s character is a killer, so once he gains access to Rachel’s contacts and begins offing them one-by-one, it simply feels like a murder checklist until the inevitable final confrontation between the two of them. While the script is lacking, director Derrick Borte at least livens things up with some incredibly-shot car chases that provide the sort of smash and bang sequences we used to expect from Russell Crowe action vehicles. 

In many ways, Unhinged feels like a throwback to ’90s revenge thrillers like Falling Down. Yet while that film included a nugget of social commentary to go alongside its violence, the only moral Unhunged provides is that we should all be nice to strangers so that they don’t try and kill us and all our loved ones.

Unhinged should be the kind of over-the-top thriller that at least provides some late-summer laughs while we’re hiding out from the latest heatwave, but the film is just too dour for that. The violence is so intense and unrelenting that it drains any fun out of what could have been a modern take on Steven Spielberg’s Duel, also about a road-rage incident taken too far. As it stands, Unhinged has some great action set pieces, and Crowe is effectively convincing as a sweat-drenched maniac out for revenge against the smallest perceived slight. Sound familiar?

Unhinged is in theatres on August 14th.