‘The Glorias’ Shows Off Some Good and Some Bad Habits of Biopic Filmmaking

September 29, 2020

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Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Lulu Wilson, Alicia Vikander, Julianne Moore, Gloria Steinem, and Director Julie Taymor behind the scenes of “The Glorias” (CREDIT: Dan McFadden/LD Entertainment and Roadside Attractions)

Starring: Julianne Moore, Alicia Vikander, Lulu Wilson, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Timothy Hutton, Janelle Monáe, Bella Abzug, Lorraine Toussaint, Enid Graham, Kimberly Guerrero, Monica Sanchez, Margo Moorer

Director: Julie Taymor

Running Time: 139 Minutes

Rating: R for Some Language and a Nude Image

Release Date: September 30, 2020 (Amazon Prime Video)

I’m of the mind that biopics – that most staid of movie genres – ought to be a little bit wacky. Or A LOT wacky. And the Julia Taymor-directed The Glorias is undoubtedly wacky. Or maybe, it’s exactly as it should be, and it’s everything else that’s askew. The subject is Gloria Steinem, one of the most famous activists in American history, so I’m sure she can appreciate an approach that breaks the mold. Taymor ditches a strictly chronological approach by having all four of the actors playing Gloria frequently interact with each other. Ryan Kiera Armstrong (young Gloria), Lulu Wilson (teen Gloria), Alicia Vikander (young adult Gloria), and Julianne Moore (older adult Gloria) are all presented as passengers on a ride heading to the promise of Steinem’s life’s work. It’s a journey that’s still ongoing as conversations between the past and present remain passionate and relevant.

Taymor fills The Glorias with occasional flights of fantastical whimsy that reminded me a fair bit of Rocketman, the most exuberant biopic in recent memory. These include a sexist interview that turns into an encounter with all four Glorias as witches, and a moment of frustration leading to Gloria running along a series of seemingly endless M.C. Escher-style roads. These moments are fascinating on their own, but they’re a bit too scattered throughout to really pack as powerful a punch as they possibly could.

The Glorias also has plenty of much more prosaic moments, and that mix of straightforward and roundabout results in a running time that clocks in thickly at nearly two and a half hours. Some of the episodes in the 1970s section, like the founding of Ms. Magazine, were also recently covered more excitingly in the FX on Hulu miniseries Mrs. America. Taymor has bitten off plenty (which is what happens when you try to cover the entire arc of someone who’s lived for nearly 90 years), and she chews as much of it as she can. When she manages to really dig in, it’s a fine fiesta to behold. You just have to deal with the messier edges if you want to find the fun.

The Glorias is Recommended If You Like: Filmmaking that’s plenty ambitious but also a little messy

Grade: 3 out of 5 Marches

‘Scare Me’ Just Lets a Couple of Horror Writers Improvise Some Spooky Stories at Each Other

September 28, 2020

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Scare Me (CREDIT: Shudder)

Starring: Aya Cash, Josh Ruben, Chris Redd, Rebecca Drysdale

Director: Josh Ruben

Running Time: 104 Minutes

Rating: Unrated (with R-Level Language)

Release Date: October 1, 2020 (Shudder)

The power is out, and you’re stuck in a secluded cabin in the dead of winter! What would you do if this happened to you? Well, if you’re one of the two main characters in Scare Me, you would ride out the night with each other and attempt to respond to the titular command with some real good creepy stories. Gathering around the fire for that purpose is a tradition that can be quite fun, but does it work when you make an entire movie about that? That is the challenge that writer/director/star Josh Ruben has set for himself. He certainly made a smart decision to cast Aya Cash opposite himself, because she just bites into everything, matching his nasty energy tit-for-tat. It’s a good thing that the performances are as demented as they are, because this movie can be quite claustrophobic to a fault.

When a movie is about people telling stories, my instinct is that it would be best to cut away to those stories as they’re being narrated. If that doesn’t happen, then it puts a LOT of pressure on the actors. Even if they rise to the occasion, I’m still inclined to wonder what it would be like if their tales got spruced up with a whole new set design or a switch to another medium. For example, it’s always fun when animation butts into live action, after all. But that’s not the type of movie that Ruben has made. Instead, he wanted to really up our anxiety levels while we hunker down with frustrated novelist Fred (Ruben) and successful novelist Fanny (Cash). I was happy to go along for the ride, but too often I felt like my patience was being tested.

While we don’t see too much of the spooky imagination transformed into visual whimsy, there is nevertheless plenty of imagination on display, as werewolves, a creepy grandpa, and a dead dog all make appearances in the stories. One yarn is even referred to as “A Star is Born, but Satan,” which certainly makes me respond, “Tell me more!” On top of all that, Cash keeps throwing her voice in a way that makes me wonder if it’s being distorted in post. At one point Chris Redd pops in as a pizza delivery guy who then joins in on the storytelling. (Oh, to be a pizza guy who can just hang around like that while on the clock!)

There’s a lingering sense of resentment on Fred’s part towards Fanny that fuels much of the night. Beyond being not very likable, though, it’s hard to get a clear read on him. Is he a misogynist, or just going through a rough time? Is he a practical joker, or a psychopath? Or is he just bored with life? How does it make sense that all of these options seem like legitimate possibilities? I’m not sure what the answer to that question is. But what I can say with confidence is, if you’re stuck at home with nothing else to do, telling each other scary stories is a fine idea. But if you’re going to make an entire movie about that, you probably ought to bust out the bells and whistles.

Scare Me is Recommended If You Like: Being stuck with grody energy

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Power Outages

It’s Adorable But Deadly Aliens vs. An Adorable But Scatterbrained Couple Attempting to Disconnect in ‘Save Yourselves!’

September 28, 2020

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Sunita Mani in “Save Yourselves!” (CREDIT: Bleecker Street)

Starring: Sunita Mani, John Paul Reynolds

Directors: Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson

Running Time: 93 Minutes

Rating: R for Profanity Screamed When Discovering a Little Alien

Release Date: October 2, 2020 (Theaters)/October 6, 2020 (Digital)

Young adults sure are so stuck in their own worlds that they could easily miss an entire invasion of aliens or monsters or some other army of supernatural creatures. I don’t think this is a generational thing. I suspect all people of past, current, and future generations are liable to succumb to this when they’re in their twenties and thirties. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if this pattern really started to take hold as cultural norms shifted to where they are now, with marriages happening later in life and job stability frequently in flux. There’s so much uncertainty about becoming a responsible adult! That was certainly the case in 2004’s Shaun of the Dead when zombies snuck their way into a land thick with ennui, and it’s a hot topic once again in Save Yourselves! as little killer furball aliens find themselves up against a millennial couple in the midst of a technology detox.

John Paul Reynolds in “Save Yourselves!” (CREDIT: Bleecker Street)

Su (Sunita Mani) and Jack (John Paul Reynolds) are your basic Brooklynites who think it would be really good for themselves to head to an upstate cabin in the woods where the Internet is unplugged and the cell phone service is nonexistent. Reynolds is an especially smart casting choice here, as he’s best known for the sitcom Search Party, which has a similar (though much more biting) satirical lens as Save Yourselves! Writer/directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson frame Su and Jack as somewhat worthy of ridicule, but they also present them as kind of adorable. They’re agitated by the daily grind of modern life and their own annoying habits, but they also make an effort to listen and be affectionate to each other. We’re primed to be on their side!

Before the aliens arrive, it’s fun to watch Su and Jack struggle to keep straight the rules of unplugging. Among their quandaries is the classic of: are you allowed to refer to an online listicle that you saved from earlier, or is that off-limits because it originated on the internet? At a certain point, though, their antics do grow a little tiresome. Luckily, the real stars of the show are those extraterrestrials. They’re basically little piles of hair (think the Tribbles from Star Trek) with tongue-like appendages hidden within their fluff that are as deadly as a gunshot. Su and Jack’s attempts to engage with them are as fraught as any life-or-death situation, but also as silly as any slapstick scenario could possibly be. The creatures have a weakness for alcohol that our heroes do their best to exploit, but they’re also so bizarre and foreign and just plain adorable that it seems like there’s just no way to figure out what to do with them. It’s a metaphor for our times, methinks. Modern life is overwhelming and pretty much impossible to navigate no matter how much you are or are not plugged into the Information Overload.

Save Yourselves! is Recommended If You Like: Shaun of the Dead, Search Party, Furbys

Grade: 3 out of 5 Pouffes

Miranda July Shows Us What It’s Like to Try to Become a ‘Kajillionaire’

September 21, 2020

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Kajillionaire (CREDIT: Matt Kennedy/Focus Features)

Starring: Evan Rachel Wood, Richard Jenkins, Debra Winger, Gina Rodriguez

Director: Miranda July

Running Time: 106 Minutes

Rating: R for A Kajillionaire’s Worth of Language and Sexual References

Release Date: September 25, 2020 (Select Theaters)

Everyone wants to be a kajillionaire, isn’t that true? We simply won’t be satisfied until we reach that level of nonsensical wealth. That’s the driving premise behind Miranda July’s new film Kajillionaire, which tells the story of a family of emotionally stunted scam artists trying to pull off their next big heist. As this movie demonstrates, the environments that we grow up in can lead us to behave in certain ways that look positively insane to outsiders. Old Dolio Dyne (Evan Rachel Wood) sure looks resentful of the shenanigans her parents (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger) wrangle her into, but she doesn’t really know any other way to live.

I’ve been practicing a movie review routine lately in which I judge the success of the movie by whether or not it makes me want to do the thing that it’s about. So then, does Kajillionaire make me want to be a kajillionaire? Not particularly, thank you, I’m perfectly fine with earning just enough cash to be comfortable. But if I dig a little deeper, what I really should be asking is: would I like to make that cheddar by running confidence games with my family? I can see the kookiness of the appeal, which I’m sure the Dyne family and July would be glad to hear. But at a certain point, I need a foundation of logic and economic stability in my life. I think Gina Rodriguez’s character can relate. She plays Melanie, an audience surrogate type who’s a big fan of the Ocean’s 11 films and gets recruited by the Dynes during a turbulent plane ride and just has plenty of fun with the whole theatricality of their schemes. But eventually things get a little sloppy and way too much to handle for anyone with a decent amount of emotional maturity.

The limits of my particular reviewing strategy are obvious with movies like Kajillionaire when it’s clear that they’re not exactly advertising the behavior on display. But July does have a knack for generating empathy in a way that can make you wonder if you actually would like us to emulate her lead characters as they navigate their wacky and thorny situations. For Old Dolio, continuing to live with her parents doesn’t just mean continuously navigating an existence outside the law, it also means a living situation that involves renting an empty office space that keeps getting flooded with bubbles. And it further means reckoning with an “apology” in the form of receiving a set of presents for all the birthdays her mom and dad missed. So let me refine my question once more: do I want to live life on the edge and then ultimately find the wherewithal to strike out on my own as much as is necessary for my own mental health (as Old Dolio ultimately must)? Maybe for a couple of hours.

Kajillionaire is Recommended If You Like: Weirdo names, Baggy tracksuits, Random bouts of limbo

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Tremors

‘Antebellum’ is Truly Confounding

September 18, 2020

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Antebellum (CREDIT: Matt Kennedy/Lionsgate)

Starring: Janelle Monáe, Jack Huston, Jena Malone, Eric Lange, Kiersey Clemons, Gabourey Sidibe, Marque Richardson, Lily Cowles

Directors: Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz

Running Time: 106 Minutes

Rating: R for Tortuous Torture

Release Date: September 18, 2020 (On Demand)

It’s pretty much impossible to talk about certain movies in depth without completely spoiling them, and Antebellum is one of those movies. So just so we’re on the same page right at the top, I’m going to get pretty in depth. But I don’t feel like I’m giving away spoilers, because the main twist of Antebellum (or what could be construed as the twist) feels more like the premise. If the writer/director duo of Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz are trying to surprise us, they don’t do a very good job of it. But the way they tip their hand so early, I don’t think they’re trying to play coy. But if that’s indeed the case and they want things to be loud and clear, it raises some questions about why they chose to reveal their information the way that they do.

When I first saw the teaser trailer for Antebellum, I assumed that Janelle Monáe was playing a 21st century woman who finds herself enslaved after becoming inexplicably transported to a pre-Civil War plantation. I didn’t know else to interpret it! The only question was, how did she get there? Was it time travel? An alternate dimension? An illusion? A series of dreams that feel all too real? Whatever the explanation, I thought it made for a potent setup. But alas, Bush and Renz aren’t really interested in reckoning with the terror of this situation. Instead, they just present it as is.

Antebellum opens on the plantation, and it takes about 40 minutes before we see Veronica Henley (Monáe) in her element in the present day with her husband and daughter, doing her thing as a successful author and scholar of vaguely elucidated intersectionality. That’s quite a long time for a prologue that tells us all we need to know in five minutes. There are people on the plantation being held against their will, and we don’t need to see them getting tortured, because we’ve already seen it in plenty of other onscreen slavery narratives. Let’s just get around to finding out how they ended up there and how they’re going to attempt to escape.

And now I’m just to get into all the nitty-gritty, so even bigger SPOILER ALERT if you want it, but this piece of information felt like the only possible explanation as soon as I started watching: Veronica and all the other enslaved people are kidnapping victims, and the plantation is a reenactment of an Antebellum South plantation, complete with slave masters and all kinds of abuse. Somehow the people behind this criminal enterprise have been able to pull it off without ever arousing suspicion from the authorities or the general public. Or maybe suspicions have been aroused! It’s hard to tell, because we never get a significant sense of the context in which this place has been erected. I can buy that there’s still enough racism in the world for there to be an interest in a place this awful, but I can’t buy that it’s practically invisible unless it exists in a fantastical world. Bush and Renz have a kernel of an effective idea here, and they’ve got a bunch of game actors ready to deliver, but they need to pay attention to all those pesky details.

Antebellum is Recommended If You Like: Trying to make sense of the inexplicable

Grade: 2 out of 5 Plantations

I’m Thinking of Writing Things (‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’ Review)

September 8, 2020

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I’m Thinking of Ending Things (CREDIT: Mary Cybulski/Netflix)

Starring: Jessie Buckley, Jesse Plemons, Toni Collette, David Thewlis

Director: Charlie Kaufman

Running Time: 134 Minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: September 4, 2020

I’m Thinking of Ending Things features a couple of things that I REALLY love in a pair of crucial scenes: a furry doggie and a trip to the ice cream shop! But there appear to be sinister elements lurking beneath the surfaces, as Jimmy the fluffy border collie seems to be stuck in a time loop of shaking himself dry, and Jake (Jesse Plemons) and the young woman (Jessie Buckley) buy their frozen treats in the middle of a snowstorm. Ice cream might taste great year-round, but if you’re going to eat it in the winter, you’d probably want to do it while snuggled up at home! (Also, that girl at the ice cream shop hints at … something nefarious.)

Really, the entirety of I’m Thinking of Ending Things is about events that I love but that have something terrifying bubbling (barely) beneath the surface. Meeting your s.o.’s parents for dinner?! Great, but the time-space continuum seems to be coming undone. Having a conversation in the car about whatever the hell pops into your head?! I love it, but often this scene is so dark that I can’t see anything at all. Dancing in a school hallway?! Hurray! … but is the janitor okay?

You’re thinking of ending things? I’m thinking of making them last forever!

Grade: 45 Dog Shakes out of 60 Ice Cream Cones

The History of a Meme Feels Good, Man in the Documentary ‘Feels Good Man’

September 3, 2020

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Feels Good Man (CREDIT: YouTube Screenshot)

Starring: Matt Furie, Pepe the Frog, 4chan

Director: Arthur Jones

Running Time: 92 Minutes

Rating: Unrated (I Would Put it at a PG or PG-13)

Release Date: September 4, 2020 (On Demand)

After he’s all been put through, Pepe the Frog somehow still feels good, man. That’s the nature of a meme that hangs around for a while. It may get stripped of context and remixed to no end, but at its core, it still maintains some piece of its essential self. And Pepe has been on quite a journey, as laid out in Arthur Jones’ documentary Feels Good Man. He began his life as an anthropomorphic amphibian with big eyes and a wide grin in cartoonist Matt Furie’s comic Boys Club. His visage was then adapted into various Internet subcultures, particularly on the image posting forum 4chan. Bizarrely enough, that led to him being co-opted into a symbol of the alt-right, and he broke through into mainstream culture in a big way when he became associated with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Soon thereafter, he was designated as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League. Meanwhile, Furie was left in this maelstrom to struggle to regain control of his creation.

Feels Good Man works best when it functions as a deep-dive investigation into how Pepe got to where he is today. Furie reveals the origins of Boys Club and how Pepe’s signature catchphrase arose from his propensity to drop his pants all the way to the floor while relieving himself. Internet experts and cultural scholars explain how memes spread online and what memes even are in the first place. A 4chan veteran lets us in on NEET (“Not in Education, Employment, or Training”) culture as we discover how 4channers became a significant segment of Trump’s coalition. Oh, and also did you know that celebrities like Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj have shared images of Pepe on social media?

The segments of Feels Good Man that focus on Furie attempting to transform Pepe into something positive again are more frustrating, not necessarily because of any filmmaking decisions but due to the Sisyphean nature of this pursuit. Simply put, the world has been flooded with so many versions of the alt-right Pepe, and there’s no drainage system that can work fast enough to fully counteract that. That also makes it tough for the documentary to have a full sense of context when the focus is on the present. Really, that’s a struggle faced by any documentary that focuses on the here and now. In a way, Feels Good Man is about that struggle, as the context of Pepe becomes impossible to fully keep track of. But then at least a glimmer of hope emerges as Furie secures some legal victories and Pepe is reborn as a symbol of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. His story isn’t over, and that weirdly makes me feel optimistic about humanity.

Feels Good Man is Recommended If You Like: People who understand the Internet explaining the Internet

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Memes

‘Bill & Ted Face the Music’ and They Also Face the Weight of Years’ Worth of Anticipation

August 27, 2020

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Bill & Ted Face the Music (CREDIT: Orion Pictures)

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Samara Weaving, Erinn Hayes, Jayma Mays, Kristen Schaal, Holland Taylor, Anthony Carrigan, William Sadler, Hal Landon Jr., Beck Bennett, Kid Cudi, Jillian Bell

Director: Dean Parisot

Running Time: 88 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for “Some Language,” Apparently

Release Date: August 28, 2020 (Theaters and On Demand)

Bill & Ted Face the Music is about the crushing expectations of destiny. It’s kind of like the Bhagavad Gita in that way. From a gnarlier perspective, it’s also about how time travel doesn’t make any sense, and won’t ever make sense, but that’s okay, because we can still be excellent to each other.

When we first met the Wyld Stallyns during their first excellent time-hopping adventure thirty years ago, we learned that their music would serve as the inspiration for a utopian society several centuries into the future. And now it’s finally time for them to answer that call. If they don’t, the time-space continuum will totally be ripped apart! But in 2020, the biggest live music gig that Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Alex Winter) can get is the wedding of Ted’s younger brother to Bill’s former stepmom. How then can they possibly live up to what Fate has asked of them? How could anybody, really? The premise worked well enough in Excellent Adventure, as it remained theoretical and fantastical, but now disappointment feels inevitable.

But fortunately Face the Music isn’t really about the promise of that world-saving composition. Rather, it is about the shenanigans that lead up to that point, naturally enough. Facing a profound case of writer’s block and a terrifying time limit of only 78 minutes, Bill and Ted figure they might as well visit their future selves and steal the song they will have already written by that point. But that proves to be fruitless no matter how far in the future they go, which begs the question: are they only able to travel into a possible future in which they’re not successful? But how could that be if they’re able to visit the utopian far future when they will have necessarily been successful? And why is there a time limit anyway? If they fail, can’t they just get in the phone booth and go back far enough in the past to start over? The stern visage of Holland Taylor (who plays the future’s Great Leader) assures us otherwise.

There’s a sanded-down quality to Face the Music that can happen when you try to resurrect old beloved characters. Bill and Ted are still plenty charming, but they’re far from as dopey as they were when they were teenagers, even though they still talk in the same surfer bro SoCal cadence. Meanwhile, there’s a trickier sort of alchemy attempted with their daughters (Brigette Lundy-Paine and Samara Weaving), who are basically gender-flipped carbon copies of their dads but they’re also actually geniuses, at least when it comes to music theory, history, and composition.

Face the Music struggles to get a handle on how ridiculous the Wyld Stallyns and their loved ones and collaborators are supposed to be. They do live in a ridiculous reality after all, as they must contend with a depression-prone killer robot (Anthony Carrigan) and a Grim Reaper (William Sadler returning from Bogus Journey) who mopes about not being allowed to deliver 40-minute bass solos. That’s often the trouble with returning to a kooky world. The base level of kookiness is already so high that any new bit of kookiness just feels like chaos. There’s a nice degree of heart here that sometimes shines through in the cacophony, but there’s nothing quite as sublime as “Bob Genghis Khan.”

Bill & Ted Face the Music is Recommended If You Like: Midlife crises, Millennia-spanning supergroups, Just-go-with-it time travel

Grade: 3 out of 5 Princess Wives

New Documentary Says, Dear Wrestling: ‘You Cannot Kill David Arquette’, Wrestling Fires Back: Chew on This

August 25, 2020

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You Cannot Kill David Arquette (CREDIT: Super LTD)

Starring: David Arquette

Directors: David Darg and Price James

Running Time: 90 Minutes

Rating: R for Wrestling Blood and Man-Butt

Release Date: August 28, 2020 (Drive-In Theaters and On Demand)

I don’t want to kill David Arquette! But it sure seems like some hardcore wresting fans do. A bit of essential background: while Arquette was promoting his 2000 wrestling comedy Ready to Rumble, he was given the WCW World Championship belt, which apparently was a historically unpopular decision. That’s the instigating factor for the documentary You Cannot Kill David Arquette, in which we see the star of Scream and Eight Legged Freaks attempt to actually make a legitimate go of a grappling career. For most of his public life, he’s been dismissed as a total goofball lightweight, and he doesn’t refute those accusations. Instead, he absorbs them as he attempts to transform into something else.

If you only know of Arquette through his most well-known movie roles, you will certainly see a new side of him here. Not an entirely new one, though. He still very much has an eager-to-please puppy-dog vibe through and through. And the hulking physique he adopts feels more like a shiny coat of paint rather than a full-on metamorphosis. But the impression that really lingers is the obsessive motor that drives Arquette to his core. He mentions at one point how he hates growing up, but I think what he really hates is letting go. Once he has decided who he is going to be and where his journey will take him, he literally cannot see any obstacles in his way to that goal

There’s a point in YCKDA when Arquette is finally going full-bore in the ring, with his face relentlessly covered in blood, and I cannot help but wonder: why? Why put yourself through that? Is it truly worth it? I know what Arquette’s answer is, and I know that it is very different from mine. That assumes, though, that he even bothers to stop and ask himself these questions, instead of just plowing forward with blinders on. Stories like You Cannot Kill David Arquette frighten me. That might be on purpose. It’s tough to watch what Mr. Arquette is putting himself through, but I do believe that he’s calling out to all of us to take witness of him.

You Cannot Kill David Arquette is Recommended If You Like: The bloodiest parts of The Wrestler, the gnarliest circuits in pro wrestling, Famous people putting themselves through a gauntlet

Grade: 3 out of 5 Heel Turns

‘Unhinged’ Doesn’t Let Its Foot Off the Senselessness Pedal

August 20, 2020

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Unhinged (PHOTO CREDIT: Skip Bolden)

Starring: Russell Crowe, Caren Pistorius, Gabriel Bateman, Jimmi Simpson, Austin P. McKenzie

Director: Derrick Borte

Running Time: 93 Minutes

Rating: R for A Massive Overreaction

Release Date: August 21, 2020

Unhinged is basically the Book of Job but like if Satan’s preferred form of torture were the most outrageous case of road rage ever. Although I must admit that this comparison isn’t perfect, as harried single mom Rachel Hunter (Caren Pistorious) is far from as perfectly righteous as Job was. But the inciting incident that she perpetrates hardly calls for the hell that she endures. While trying to get her son Kyle (Gabriel Bateman) to school on time, she slams on her car horn at the truck stuck in front of her at a green light. The fact that she didn’t instead offer a quick courtesy honk is all the justification that Tom Cooper (Russell Crowe), the driver of that truck, needs to go on a violent spree of making bad things happen to good people.

My biblical reference may sound like a rather high-minded interpretation for such a pulpy film, but I don’t know how else to process this senselessness. Tom says that he’s “been kind of having a hard time lately,” but we never really learn what that is all about. The implication is that he’s finally snapped after being mistreated himself for too long and that he’s now going to take out his anger on whoever’s in his way. But since we learn essentially nothing about his backstory, he registers more as an anonymous agent of evil than an actual person. In that way, Unhinged is like a high-speed, wide-open version of The Strangers, as society is invaded by meaningless destruction disguised as some guy wearing the mask of road rage.

The opening credits feature a montage of traffic accidents, thereby suggesting that Tom’s revenge is the ultimate consequence of a selfish American driving culture. But Tom is too undefined to actually feel like a product of that backstory. He strikes me as more of a piece with the motiveless killers that were in vogue in 70s horror landmarks like Halloween and The Last House on the Left, which The Strangers is a clear descendant of. Nevertheless, I think the viewers who most enjoy Unhinged will be the ones whose blood pumps at one-man-pushed-to-the-brink thrillers like Death Wish or Falling Down. Unlike in those flicks, though, the focus here is on the mom who fights back against that guy and summons the strength to protect her cub. That doesn’t really make the carnage any more palatable, though it does at least make it less likely to linger with a sour aftertaste in your conscience.

Unhinged is Recommended If You Like: Taxi Driver but because you want to fight back and teach the Travis Bickles of the world a lesson

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Cases of the Mondays

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