Overall Rating
  Awesome: 19.42%
Worth A Look: 53.4%
Average: 9.71%
Pretty Bad: 6.8%
Total Crap: 10.68%
9 reviews, 49 user ratings
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| Unleashed |
by Rob Gonsalves
"Another fine Luc Besson parable about a killer with a soul."
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At 42, the martial-arts master Jet Li is obviously looking for roles with which he can age gracefully.He may have found one in Unleashed, in which Li plays Danny, a man-child raised and trained by vicious Glasgow gangster Bart (Bob Hoskins) to turn into a whirlwind of carnage whenever Bart removes Danny's metal collar. (The movie's original title was Danny the Dog, which I sort of prefer.) For the first reel or so, we're treated to some impressively percussive fights, and Jet Li drops the dead-cool persona I've seen in some of his other films. When Danny is uncollared, Li flies into action with an odd mix of sadness and rage — not rage at his opponents but at the life he's been forced to accept.
Luc Besson wrote Unleashed, and it harks back to the films that made his name internationally as a director — La Femme Nikita (1990) and The Professional (1994). All three movies explore killers with souls — assassins who happen to be very good at what they do, but often wish they weren't. Left to his own devices, Danny would be happier listening to music or reading picture books. He's a gentle soul, not unlike an attack dog in his simple view of reality: If the collar comes off, that means someone is threatening the only father figure he has ever known, and that someone must be ground into the dirt. I was reminded of news stories about rottweilers or pit bulls who could have been raised in kindly homes to be mellow pets; instead they were bred to kill, and escaped and mauled the wrong quarry (usually a child).
Before Danny can be warped into a rabid dog who kills indiscriminately, though, fate cuts him some slack. He meets an amiable old blind piano tuner named Sam (Morgan Freeman), who invites Danny to peck out a few notes on some dusty keys. Later, on the run from Bart and his cronies, a wounded Danny shows up at Sam's door. Sam takes him in — the whipped dog has found a better master, though Sam isn't interested in being anyone's master. Sam and his gawky stepdaughter Victoria (Kerry Condon), a student pianist in Britain on a scholarship, teach Danny how to be human. It sounds significantly sappier than it is, just as the basic throughline of The Professional (hit man takes orphan girl under his wing) sounds rather moist until you see what Besson does with it.
Unleashed is pretty trim, with no extraneous characters or subplots; there are essentially only four people, and the actors — particularly veterans Freeman (he's better in this than in Million Dollar Baby, I thought) and Hoskins (gleefully revisiting his Long Good Friday territory) — have room to breathe. Jet Li often has the aspect of a cowed dog here, most poignantly when Bart catches up with Danny and he's forced to resume his role as killer for cash (a shady character has offered Bart big bucks to pit Danny against various combatants). Classical music humanizes him, just as it did with Gary Oldman's otherwise slimy cop in The Professional (both movies take their cue from A Clockwork Orange in that respect — music hath charms, and all that). Because the writing and filmmaking (Louis Leterrier, who also filmed Besson's earlier script The Transporter, directed) are focused on this hard-bitten parable without any excess flab, Danny's transition from dog to man feels archetypal or mythical, not manipulative.
Far-fetched? Sure, but that never stopped Besson before. And Jet Li has finally made the anti-violence violent movie he's reportedly always wanted to make — there's a brilliant sequence in which Danny must fend off several brutal opponents without killing them, and it displays far more exciting ingenuity than if Danny just went in there and wiped everyone out. (The fights were designed by master choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping, adding yet another gem to his portfolio. The man may be crazy busy these days, but it sure hasn't affected the integrity of his work.)'Unleashed' will belong on your shelf next to 'Nikita' or 'The Professional' if you're a Besson fan, or next to Jet Li's better Hong Kong films if you're a Jet fan, or even next to 'Long Good Friday' and 'Mona Lisa' if you're a Bob Hoskins fan.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=11680&reviewer=416
originally posted: 02/03/07 10:59:02
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 SXSW Film Festival. For more in the 2005 South By Southwest Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
13-May-2005 (R)
DVD: 11-Oct-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
18-Aug-2005
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