Russell Crowe’s perfect portrait of angry man in road rage thriller Unhinged

An intimidating performance in road rage thriller Unhinged confirms that Russell Crowe is one of the greatest actors of our time.

Russell Crowe in new movie Unhinged

To star in Gladiator (2000), for which he won an Oscar, Russell Crowe spent months in the gym and followed a strict diet. In his superb new film, the road rage thriller Unhinged, it looks like his preparation consisted of eating pizzas, drinking beer and slouching on the couch.

He’s huge, at least as large as he was as Roger Ailes in the recent TV series The Loudest Voice. And here’s the thing: he’s more intimidating than Ailes, more pitiless than a gladiator. He’s a quiet, unflinching, menacing hulk. He reportedly wore a fat suit for the role. If so, he carries it well.

This performance, like the one in The Loudest Voice, for which he won a Golden Globe, confirms, if we need confirmation, that this Kiwi-Aussie rugby league fan is one of the greatest actors of our time.

And it’s not Crowe alone in this 90-minute, edge-of-seat psychological and physical drama directed by American filmmaker Derrick Borte (The Jones, London Town). The other stars, South Africa-born New Zealander Caren Pistorius, the young Gabriel Bateman and, in a brief but crucial scene, Jimmi Simpson (Westworld), all knock it out of the park.

A warning though: this is a violent movie. It’s MA15+ here and R in the US.

The pre-credits opening shows a large man, Tom Hunter (Crowe), sitting in a pick-up truck outside a house in a tree-lined street somewhere in the US (the movie was shot in New Orleans). It’s raining hard. Tom takes some prescription drugs, gets out of the truck, goes to the house and what happens is brutal.

After the opening credits we meet Rachel (Pistorius), a 30-something woman at the start of a divorce. She lives with her son, Kyle (Bateman), who looks about 13, and her younger brother and his girlfriend.

Rachel, running late because she forgot to set the alarm, is driving her son to school when she encounters Tom. She’s driving an old station wagon. Traffic is gridlocked, she’s frustrated and when the pick-up truck in front of her misses a green light, she honks loudly, swerves around through the lights, and honks again.

At the next set of lights, the pick-up pulls alongside. Tom winds down his window and asks why he didn’t receive the “courtesy tap”. As any driver will know, he means the gentle toot of the horn to alert him he’s missing a light change.

Caren Pistorius in a scene from Unhinged

Rachel brushes him off. He apologises for his mistake at the lights and asks that she apologise for the loud beeping. At this point it feels like an episode of Seinfeld titled The Courtesy Tap. I could see George Costanza landing in a lot of trouble over something like this.

Rachel refuses to apologise. She says she has had a bad day. Tom stares at her with a look even her son can interpret. He wisely tells his mother to apologise. Then Tom speaks: “I don’t think you know what a bad day is. But you’re going to find out. Do you hear me, miss? You’re going to f. king learn.”

Crowe is mesmerising at this moment. It made me a little disappointed at the pre-credits scene because it flagged the sort of man he was. I thought I would have preferred to find that out myself. But I soon realised that wasn’t the director’s intention. He wants us to know from the start who we are dealing with.

What follows is a blend of Steven Spielberg’s 1971 debut Duel and Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (Tom and Michael Douglas’s character in that 1993 film share the following: being sacked, ex-wife issuing a restraining order, a traffic incident). Like William in Falling Down, Tom thinks he has been ignored all his life.

“I’ll make my contribution this way,” he declares, “through violence and retribution.”

Tom pursues Rachel, on the road and off it. He steals her mobile phone, which means he knows her (and her brother’s) address, her son’s school and her mother’s nursing home.

“Give me a name,” he tells her. “Make a choice. Who am I going to kill next?”

Then there’s Andy (Simpson), a lawyer and friend of Rachel who is helping her with the divorce. He’s in a diner, expecting Rachel, but it’s Tom who shows up and sits across from him.

Crowe and Simpson suck the oxygen from the room in this hold-your-breath scene. It reminds me of the unforgettable sisters-at-a-restaurant moment in Leigh Whannell’s recent take on The Invisible Man. It’s just brilliant.

Tom does what he does out in the open and he’s soon on the TV news. What we see is not stylised superhero movie violence. It is realistic violence, quiet and ruthless.

Crowe, the great actor he is, becomes Tom, a man no one should want to be.

The opening credits also include news footage of random acts of public violence not dissimilar to what we have seen of late: people fighting over toilet paper and so on. “We were born angry,” says some expert interviewed on the news.

I wonder if he’s right. Have we always been angry and the only difference now is that camera phones and social media make our anger more visible? This question, about the causes and consequences of an angry society, is the one that lingers in the mind in the wake of this movie.

Unhinged (MA15+)
★★★★
Selected cinemas

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The Crime Boss (MA15+)
★★½
Google Play, Apple TV and available on DVD

The Crime Boss, the directorial debut of American filmmaker Clark Duke, is prefaced by a quote from Morrissey’s 1993 song Sister I’m a Poet, and then moves into a soliloquy by one of the main characters, Kyle Rib (Australia’s Liam Hemsworth).

“I am a drug dealer … I am near the bottom rung of an outfit run by a man named Frog, a man I have never met before.”

That sums up this drama (with a fair bit of comedy, intended or otherwise) about the drug dealing business in the American south, the so-called Dixie Mafia.

It’s based on Arkansas, the 2009 debut novel of John Brandon, and in its American release retains that title.

It should also pose the central question: who is Frog, the boss of the group of “scumbags and deadbeats” that Kyle is part of?

But this is an odd movie that goes back and forth between two stories, one set now and one set in the mid 1980s, so we know early on who Frog is.

Clarke Duke and Liam Hemsworth in The Crime Boss

In the present, taciturn Kyle and his intellectual offsider, Swin Horn (the director Duke), are asked to truck some drugs from Arkansas to Texas.

Early on they meet another taciturn bloke (Vince Vaughn) who runs a rustic pawn shop. He’ll become important.

There are some dramatic moments and some comic moments, but it does feel as though the script (the director and Andrew Boonkrong) has kidnapped the plot.

There’s a lot of philosophising, such as this from drug dealer Almond (Michael Kenneth Williams) in 1985: “Individuals of low quality are running the whole goddamn planet.’’ Some of today’s viewers may think he has a point.

The highlight, one that makes this movie worth watching, is John Malkovich, in the present time frame, as a park ranger named Bright. He too becomes important. I will not reveal any more about him except to add that there’s a scene where he hangs out with Kyle and Rib. He’s in his living room, reclining on a couch.

He looks down at his long-toenailed feet. “They say,’’ he tells no one in particular, “that I have the feet of Christ.”

I have no idea if that’s an allusion to something important – perhaps it’s from another Morrissey song – but it makes me laugh, as does everything else Malkovich does in this marvellous extended cameo.