Unhinged  ★★★

THERE is nothing subtle about the road rage drama Unhinged.

Russell Crowe plays the driver of a big pickup truck who takes offence when a young mother, Rachel, blasts her car horn loudly when he doesn’t move from traffic lights.

Rachel is late taking her son to school and has just lost her major client as a result.  At the same time she is dealing with an ex-husband who is trying to sue her for the family home.

What Rachel doesn’t realise is that the man she argues with on the road is also having relationship problems.

He has recently lost his job and his wife and, as we see in the first scene of the film, has murdered both her and her new partner with a hammer and burned their house to the ground.

Tom Cooper (or so he calls himself at one point) is not a man to pick a fight with.

Unfortunately, while Unhinged is no doubt exciting at times, it is certainly not subtle in any way.

German director Derek Borte and his writer Carl Ellsworth throw everything at the audience in trying to make some kind of social statement about life pushing us all to the extremes.

At times it’s hard to tell whether they are trying to garner some semblance of audience sympathy for Tom.

That is never going to work so they always fall back on more sudden violence, including some particularly realistic car smashes.

Unhinged is ultimately a horror thriller and should be taken exactly as that.

Tom Cooper is a violent angry misogynist and the film is full of believable violence that is sometimes hard to watch, particularly when he is beating the crap out of Rachel and threatening to set her younger brother on fire.

The other thing the film isn’t is very believable.

As the bodies start to pile up and the level of Tom’s violent retribution intensifies in very public ways, the police constantly seem notable by their absence.

There is a moment near the end of the film when, rather return to the scene of a major highway accident where she knows the police will be, or even drive to the nearest police station, Rachel decides to take her son to grandmas in the full knowledge that Tom will follow them there.

In the end we get the predictable climax you would expect from such a film, including the Arnold Schwarzenegger style pun.

I don’t think Crowe has ever played such an outright villain.

Certainly, as Hendo in Romper Stomper, the 1992 film that brought him to the world’s attention, he was reprehensible but there was also a tiny bit of subtlety.

Since then he has occasionally played the villain, in films like Virtuosity in 1995, as Dr Jekyll briefly in the 2017 version of The Mummy and more recently as the anti-gay father in Boy Erased and and predator Roger Ailes in The Loudest Voice.

Tom Cooper is something else again. Crowe is good in the part but, while I wouldn’t say the role is beneath his talents, it’s certainly not stretching them.

South African born New Zealand actress Caren Pistorius is good in the lead female role and Gabriel Bateman is also fine as her son Kyle.

It’s an exciting, straight-forward thriller but, be warned, the violence is confronting and realistic.