By Robert Scucci
| Published
“Back in my day, spree killings in movies used to mean something,” is the sentence that I found myself uttering after streaming 2020’s Unhinged on Netflix this past weekend. After punching the air for several minutes while the credits rolled, I thought about what I had just said, took some deep breaths to center myself, and decided to think about things rationally for a second, which is more than I can say about a single character in this action thriller that fails to land because there’s nobody worth rooting for.
Disappointed and deflated, but never not amused, I tried to think about what Unhinged was actually going for, and then I started to laugh because it feels like writer Carl Ellsworth and director Derrick Borte really thought they had the next Falling Down on their hands while missing the entire point of the 1993 Michael Douglas-starring masterpiece, which actually involves characters who are sympathetic despite their atrocious behavior.
A One-Dimensional Revenge Arc
Unhinged begins with Russell Crowe’s Tom Cooper murdering his ex-wife and her boyfriend, and lighting their house on fire before we’re introduced to Rachel Flynn (Caren Pistorius), a recently divorced single mother whose attitude is so rotten that it makes you wonder how responsible she was for her failed marriage in the first place.
I’m not trying to be too hard on Rachel, however, because it could very well be the case that she has a bad attitude as a result of her divorce, but we’re never given enough context to confirm this.
Basing my opinion of Rachel on what I saw play out on-screen, and not the events that took place in her life before the events depicted in Unhinged, I found it hard to see her in a positive light because it’s established right away that she’s blowing off work and half-assing on the parenting front, resulting in her son, Kyle (Gabriel Bateman), having to pay the price because she’s his ride to school, and he gets punished with detention for his frequent tardiness.
Rachel’s combative attitude is also what sets Unhinged in motion because after she gets fired by her best client (for the above mentioned reasons), she finds herself stuck behind Tom at an intersection, which leads to her leaning on the horn, and speeding past him.
That Escalated Quickly
At the next traffic stop, Unhinged shows its namesake when Tom apologizes to Rachel, and asks her to do the same to him. Instead of apologizing, Rachel downright refuses even though Kyle begs her to because he’s terrified. From this point forward, Tom follows Rachel through town, steals her phone when she stops at the gas station, starts scrolling through her contacts, and sets out to kill everybody she cares about in order to teach her a lesson.
Tom murders a lot of people in Unhinged, but also makes it very clear that he’ll stop if Rachel apologizes. Rachel doesn’t ever apologize – even after Tom starts his rampage, because she’s too stubborn to admit fault, or, at the very least, say what he wants to hear so he stops trying to kill her family and friends while also endangering countless innocent bystanders in the process.
Unhinged Is Not Falling Down
At face-value, it’s easy to compare Unhinged to Falling Down in the sense that both films feature a man who has an axe to grind and nothing to lose after being mistreated by the world for his entire life. The comparison stops here, however, because despite William “D-Fens” Foster’s (Michael Douglas) insane behavior in the 1993 film, he’s still a sympathetic character; he has the startling revelation that he’s actually the bad guy after having some sense talked into him, and has to face the consequences for his actions.
Sure, William Foster is basically just a Karen with a gun going off on unsuspecting victims in Falling Down, but writer Ebbe Roe Smith and director Joel Schumacher make it very clear that he’s not right in the head, feels wronged by society, and decides to take matters into his own hands. As William Foster’s behavior escalates, the audience goes from rooting for him, to thinking he’s taking things a little too far, to realizing that he’s not the hero in Falling Down, but simply the protagonist whose story they’re following.
Unhinged, on the other hand, does none of this.
Tom Cooper’s rampage hardly feels justified because his odyssey starts with a murder with no context explaining what pushed him over the edge. In fact, since Unhinged starts over the edge, there’s nowhere else to push its continually escalating premise to aside from the increasingly violent territory it occupies with little to no payoff. To make matters worse, Rachel, who was clearly dealt a bad hand in life, exhibits zero grace or tact about her own situation, making her patently unlikeable because at any point in the film she should have just delivered a half-assed apology and moved on with her life without getting stalked by a psychopath who has no real exit plan for his murder spree.
Instead, she takes zero responsibility for her own situation, and makes herself an unnecessary victim because her pride doesn’t allow her to be introspective and admit any fault on her part for even a second.
Streaming Unhinged On Netflix
All criticism aside, Unhinged is absolutely hilarious because these aren’t real people – they’re one-dimensional caricatures who speak in action thriller tropes. I’m not even going to tell you the one-liner that brings things around full-circle during Rachel’s final confrontation with Tom because I don’t want to spoil what’s meant to be a badass punchline after 90 minutes of buildup that has no right being as funny as I found it.
Watching Unhinged as an unintentional comedy is the way to go, and you can do so by streaming the title on Netflix the next time you want to witness a mindless rampage of the highest order.
