Among the many mysteries of the world, few are more profound or significant than the question of why a particular movie or TV show is at the top of the Netflix chart on any given day. Some of the movies that get to that spot make sense, but others can be head-scratchers, at least at first blush.
Unhingedis one such title that has been dominant on theNetflix chartsrecently, and while it may seem like a pretty random movie, there are some important reasons for its appeal. The movie tells the simple story of a woman who honks at another car in rush hour traffic, only to discover that the man behind the wheel of the other car is now tailing her, and has hatched a plan for revenge. Here are three reasons you should check it out.
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It gives Russell Crowe a chance to go full villain mode
For most of his career,Russell Crowehas played some variation of the leading man. As lead actors age, though, they often slip into other kinds of roles, and those roles often give them a chance to show off skills that they didn’t get to display during their leading-man days.
That’s exactly the case for Crowe here as he plays a villain who lives up to the name of the movie he’s in. Crowe displays some true menace here that isn’t part of his normal body of work, and by the end of the movie, it’s easy to forget that we rooted for this guy inGladiator.
It’s delightfully pulpy
Part of the reasonUnhingedmight be so popular is that it has a remarkably simple, easy-to-engage premise. It’s a story of road rage gone horribly awry, taking a circumstance that many people have encountered and pushing it to its extreme.
The result is a film that’s full of propulsive energy, and one that will keep you watching in part because of the danger it puts its central character in.Unhingedfeels like a B movie, and it doesn’t have any aspirations to be anything more than that.
It’s indebted to an early Spielberg masterwork
Unhingedhas a lot of obvious similarities withDuel, one ofSteven Spielberg’s very first movies. The film tells the story of a man who inadvertently makes a truck driver very angry, and then is pursued across the country by that very same truck. The difference withDuelis that we never see the other driver.
WhileUnhingedlacks some of the technical wizardry that a young Spielberg was able to bring to the project, both movies are worth watching, if only to remember how the legacy of older films gets passed down to newer titles.
