Unleashed - A Junkyard Dog With the Soul Of A Puppy

Nov

30

Unleashed - A Junkyard Dog With the Soul Of A Puppy

≡ Category: Action, France, Highly Recommended, Movie Reviews By Country |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: France
Genre: Action/Drama
Director: Louis Leterrier
Year: 2005

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MOVIE

No one, no matter how seemingly indestructable, can be a martial arts action hero forever. Jackie Chan has been slowing down for some time now, although he’s still in better shape than most 20-year-olds. Jet Li is fully aware of this reality and he’s been making plans to migrate to more character based roles. Exhibit A: Unleashed AKA Danny The Dog, as it’s called in Europe and Asia (much better title).

Danny (Jet Li) has been raised from childhood by Bart (Bob Hoskins) to be an attack dog, either to protect his master or fight for him in staged battles, on which there is heavy betting. Danny becomes separated from Bart and ends up running into Sam (Morgan Freeman), a blind piano tuner. Danny’s humanity has been repressed, but under the influence of Sam’s kindness, he begins to blossom.

The role of Danny provides the combat that Jet Li’s fan relish while allowing Jet to emote. Jet Li is required to show Danny’s rage and psychological damage, while simultaneously revealing the childlike qualities of an unformed personality. For the comic book style of Unleashed, Jet’s acting is more than adequate for the task, but no one will mistake him for the next Lawrence Olivier either.

That’s probably not even being fair. Playing the mentally incapacitated has defeated actors as fine as Dustin Hoffman and Sean Penn. Given the limitations of the material, Jet Li is quite affecting.

Morgan Freeman does his usual gig as a wise and kindly man, but he doesn’t just phone it in, which I admire. Every time he’s asked to portray a fount of wisdom yet again, it must get harder and harder. I wish he would get more roles like Fast Black the pimp in Street Smart, the film that put him on the map for casting directors. But I digress.

Most Trash Cinema Club readers will want to know, does Unleashed succeed as an action piece? You bet. The great Yuen Wo Ping (The Matrix, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Once Upon A Time In China) was the martial arts coordinator, and while there is some wire work, it is subtle. There are roundhouse kicks and whatnot, but there is a lot of punching, head butts, and thrown elbows, which is exactly the sort of streetfighting style that Danny would have been taught. As you’d expect, Jet Li performs the moves expertly.

Thankfully, director Louis Leterrier (unless it was Yuen Wo Ping) films the action like a dance. Most of the camera angles are from medium distance, which allows us to appreciate the beautiful movements. When there are cuts or changes in the camera angles, they are motivated by the director’s desire to reveal Jet’s fighting strategies or to showcase a particular move. It’s fluid and brutal at the same time, the perfect combination for this type of fighting.

But Unleashed is much more than a standard action flick. From the brief description I gave of the plot, you would think that the Bob Hoskins character, Bart, would be the apogee of pure evil. To screenwriter Luc Besson’s credit, it’s not that simple. Bart is a crude man, who has managed to justify his treatment of Danny by telling himself that Danny is just an animal at this point. He treats him like a favored junkyard dog, rewarding Danny with treats, asking an underling to “sort Danny out” after Danny has sustained injuries in a fight, and all but patting Danny on the head.

But Danny, despite his brutal treatment, is not just an animal. After being given a roll of bandages to fix a head wound, he clearly doesn’t know what to do with the bandages. After being shut into his cage, he works out on a punching bag, splitting it open. Later, while trying to read a grade school alphabet primer, the blood from his head wound drips on the book. Danny glances at the bandages and then at the sand pouring from the punching bag. You can see the light bulb going on over his head. Cut to the punching bag, which has been repaired with the bandages.

This is effective writing, and one of the reasons writer Luc Besson has created some of the best action films of the last 20 years (La Femme Nikita, Leon). His premises, like the one for Unleashed, are frequently juicy, promising not only plenty of action, but a strong rooting interest and character development besides.

About half an hour in, Unleashed takes an abrupt detour from extreme action to character study. It’s a measure of how good the writing is that we don’t resent it. For one thing, we’re rooting for Danny to discover his humanity and escape from the prison of his mind. For another, there is built in suspense because we don’t want Bart to get his mitts on Danny.

Of course he does, or Unleashed would be a very short movie. (One smallish criticism — when trouble sets in, director Louis Leterrier resorts to one of the hoariest cliches in the book, thunder and lightning as a backdrop. It’s unnecessary and trivializes the rest of the good work he does, not to mention the writing and the fine acting by Bob Hoskins, Morgan Freeman, and yes, even Jet Li.)

Part of Danny’s struggle is to renounce violence, which you would think would be a problem in a movie whose reason for existing is the violence in it. The filmmakers resolve this paradox brilliantly in a climax that provoked laughter in the theater I saw Unleashed in.

Unleashed manages to have it’s cake and eat it, too. It’s tremendously violent and succeeds grandly as an action picture — yet it works as a character piece and as a drama. Somehow, Unleashed stays true to it’s message of nonviolence even as it’s characters beat the bloody pulp out of each other. Now, that’s what I call entertainment!