Unhinged: The Batman Movie Nobody Wanted

Full Disclosure: I don't hate Uwe Boll. I legitimately admire his business sense. I also like In The Name of the King and Rampage. I'm going to lambaste the shit out of him here, but let the record show it doesn't come from a place of contempt, only brutally honest criticism. 

It's not easy being Russell Crowe. I should probably have another disclosure about him, how the controversies about his personality, his run-ins with the law, have been painfully blown out of proportion. He's a walking example of the "But ya shag one sheep!" joke. Tom Cruise at least has Top Gun and the Mission Impossible franchise to balance out his... more eccentric attributes. Crowe's filmography has been almost experimental for the most part, as if directors and producers don't quite know what to do with him. His early career tried to play him up as a suave, smooth-talking charmer or relatable everyman/hearthrob (A Beautiful Mind, LA Confidential). He seems most at home in action (Gladiator, Robin Hood), but he's also tackled very cerebral dramas (Master & Commander, Cinderella Man). Then, there's Noah and Man of Steel. Jury's out on those. I mean, I like them, and he's the best part of the latter. 

His films are few and far between compared to most auteur A-listers, which unfortunately means every new entry is a tough sell against the deluge of controversy. When the trailer for Unhinged was released, there was no shortage of wannabe jokers in the comments calling the film a cinema verite style documentary about Crowe's daily life. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt that this is him effectively owning the controversy, some para-meta-ironic middle finger to his haters, but he's either too late to the party to pull the prank on the pretentious preppies, or he's killed the man and become the monster.

I'm calling this an unofficial entry/preview in a series of posts I've got in the pipeline entitled, "Reasons I Shouldn't Write Screenplays" an idea I freely admit to stealing whole cloth from Noah "The Spoony One" Antwiler. They're as much musings and meditations on various tropes and trends of the Hollywood dream factory as they are semi-serious sales pitches for reboots, reimaginings, retoolings, or redirects of some of the biggest franchises and flops dotting the greater pop culture landscape. 

The plot of Unhinged takes it cue from horror writing 101. Take a mundane, inconsequential thing, and turn it into a matter of life and death. This isn't a bad thing, only a little tired. No movie is ever released in a vacuum and some of the dialogue is not helping to convince people of idea parallelism (a fancy legalese-esque word for a coincidence). 

A single mother (Caren Pistorious) is driving home with her son when she gets stuck behind a pickup truck at a green light. In a fit of frustration, she emphatically honks her horn before giving up and driving around. The owner of the truck (Crowe) later confronts her that a brief tap of the horn would have been sufficient while explaining that he's been having a bad day, apologizing for earlier while expecting the same from her. She stubbornly dismisses him, and the conflict ensues. At one point on the driver's path of systematic destruction in the name of revenge, he reveals his intention is to show her what a bad day really looks like. 

That line struck more than a few familiar chords with film-goers, with many mentions of the Alan Moore story The Killing Joke going hand-in-hand with the comparisons to the recent Oscar nominee Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix. The Killing Joke was written in 1988 hot on the heels of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns series in an effort to convince the wider public that the caped crusader was not the bright and colorful shark-repelling deputy cemented into the public perception by the Adam West-led TV series. It attempts to offer an origin story for the Joker, one that's meant to paint him as a tragic figure, a victim of circumstance. As part of his plot to garner sympathy for his situation, he opines that anyone could have become the Clown Prince of Crime as a result of "just one bad day." 

Hollywood has toyed with this idea in the past, examples including the likes of Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, Straw Dogs, and Falling Down (to name a few). Those movies predate the Columbine disaster by many years, and while mass shootings and other acts of terror by disgruntled individuals have a history predating those films (Dog Day Afternoon being loosely based on a real life event), an apparent increase in violent shootings and assaults have brought this trope under a new light of scrutiny. Much of the scrutiny feels misdirected, like it's working under a false premise that the main character of any movie is meant to be perceived as a heroic ideologue. It's true many misunderstanding movie-goers (mainly male) may make a manifesto of the malignancy and malice, missing the masqueraded meaning regarding motives, means, and opportunities. That is, these characters are only heroes by default, the lessers to greater evils. The circumstances that created them and drove them to their extremes are not triumphs, but tragedies not unlike those that befall the men who slay monsters only to become them in the process. The modus operandi of these misunderstood ordinaries are not meant to be mimicked outright, but mulled over. 

To put this process in perspective, Roger Ebert described the comedic machinations of the Naked Gun movies thusly: You'll laugh, then laugh at yourself for laughing. You may well find yourself rooting for Michael Douglas as he obliterates a phone booth with machine gun fire to spite an impatient man eager to make a call. It's easy to find yourself dancing to Joaquin Phoenix's beat as you traverse any long sequence of steps. None of these reactions are inherently wrong. That's the magic of movies, if not the whole of storytelling in general. 

I made an off-hand comment to a friend on Twitter about how Unhinged was essentially what we'd get if Uwe Boll adapted The Killing Joke but ran out of money and/or lost the rights to the Batman license partway through. Obviously, the film in no way, shape, or form resembles The Killing Joke beyond some throwaway lines that touch on the same philosophies about human nature, the choices we make, and our responsibility in light of the consequences of those choices. That said, the more I thought about it, the more I realized this plot has a stronger tie to the Batman universe than likely anyone involved in the film realizes. 

Put simply, the Joker is no stranger to road rage. 

Joker's Favor is an early, but much-loved episode of Batman: The Animated Series. While typically falling shy of any top spots, it often ranks highly on many best episodes list, and it's not undeserved. It also takes a mundane, inconsequential event and turns it into something far more sinister. An accountant named Charlie (voiced by Ed Begley Jr.) drives home from a bad day at work. His impatience with other drivers ends up getting him face to face with the Joker. Joker lets Charlie go on the condition that he may well ask him for a favor some day. Two years elapse before Charlie, despite having moved and changed his name, is contacted by the Joker to fulfill his end of the bargain from earlier. 

What follows is a rather predictable turning of the tables in the cat and mouse game via an ordinary man being driven to extraordinary actions, though with the saving grace of a timely and graceful step back from the edge. What makes it work is the show's complete and utter commitment to the subject matter. It's played perfectly straight and allows you to suspend disbelief on how things will turn out for those involved. 

Unhinged, just like Charlie's future in Joker's Favor, could go a number of ways. Monsters can be slain as easily as they can be made. Currently, its box office performance (including a delayed release thanks to the Coronavirus Pandemic) is less than impressive, a few million shy of halfway to its 33 million dollar budget (Falling Down was made for 25 million in 1997, a little over 40 million adjusted for inflation). Critics have been equally cold, dismissing it as uninspired, unable to justify its own existence against other films of its stated variety. Those jokes about Crowe's temper seem to have run their course. As for those other comments calling Caren Pistorious' character a Karen... 

NoWahT?

Got back from Noah, starring Russell Crowe and my first kid crush Jennifer Connelly (seriously, I lost count of how many times I saw Labyrinth as a kid), and I can't decide if I like it or not. About the only thing I can say without reservation is that it is one of the absolute weirdest films I've ever seen. Bear in mind, I was a film major, which means I've seen a lot of weird, disturbing, bizarre, and downright goofy stuff on screen that I cannot unsee. I'm not asking for a Purple Heart. I'm simply giving context and background to better hit home the point that this is not merely one of the strangest Biblical films you're likely to see, but one of the strangest films you're likely to see, full stop. The film is a nutty, synergistic mish-mash of post-apocalyptic sci-fi--complete with gas mining, aluminum siding, and even a grenade launcher--and high fantasy--complete with magic stones, flaming swords, and rock monsters--all wrapped up in a plot that's only quasi-Biblical at best. 

I'm not kidding about the rock monsters, by the way. 

While there is some Biblical precedent for these giants, they are one of the more fanciful licenses taken with the lore, even more than the magic rocks that make grenade launchers and pregnancy tests work. The trailer doesn't show so much as a hint of them, but they play a very significant role in the plot, if only up to about the halfway point. For what little they're on screen, though, they're the most fascinating film creatures I've seen in years. They have multiple, spindly arms, and hobble around on stumpy, lopsided legs. They twitch and jitter like doddering old folk, yet give them the task of protecting the ark from the last of humanity, and they will bust some heads. 

It may seem like I'm dwelling on these guys as a stalling measure to keep from giving any sort of final verdict on whether or not I liked the film and if I'd recommend it, and you'd probably be right. They are the highlight in that of all the disparate, even conflicting, elements that make up the film, they work the best. The remainder, especially what we're left with in the second half, is a little more haphazard and slapdash, like the movie forgot that it's supposed to be about Noah's Ark halfway through the story and spent the rest of the time ticking boxes on a checklist to make quota. Some boxes, though, get unchecked, and they're the ones that serve to illustrate how the story of Noah's Ark doesn't work adapt all that well to cinema compared to most other Bible stories like Moses or Samson and Delilah or even the story of Jesus. It works better as a vignette, like the tower of Babel or Abraham and Isaac or the story of Job. 

The main reason why the movie's few attempts to stay true to the original story fall flat is that it tries too hard to address some of the logistical issues of the deluge and the ark, namely matters of reproduction in the aftermath. Noah has three children, all boys, and only one of them has someone to take as a wife. Noah takes it upon himself to fix this problem, which might have worked as a main plot if it wasn't simply a fetch quest for baby-makers. That's not to say it's misogynistic or objectifying or anything like that; it doesn't have time to be. It simply isn't handled well, and the film virtually looks you in the eye and tells you in frankness not to get invested in this subplot, then goes through it anyway to waste time. A lesser film would have handwaved the matter altogether, but a better film would have made it central and offered up some great character development. To its credit, there is this very heart-wrenching scene in which Emma Watson's character is distraught over not being able to bear children, feeling like less of a woman for it. You could argue the gravitas of the situation, or at least the consolation offered up by Noah, gets made academic by way of a certain miracle at the hands of Sir Anthony Hopkins, but given that the damage was already done by the botched matchmaking, it's not worth nitpicking. In the end, it still manages to send a strong message about family not being about bloodlines but about compassion and love. 

Going through what does and doesn't work about Noah makes me think of what Kevin Smith said about his post-Askewniverse movies. To paraphrase, he said he'd rather make a movie he knows is flawed on some fundamental level than play it safe for appeal's sake because of the discussions the former will lead to. That's how Noah is. It's definitely divisive, but it's not polarizing. I don't think it's actually possible to wholly love or wholly hate this film. More likely, you'll pick and choose what works for you and what doesn't, kind of like what people do with the Bible. Let's just hope there's a lot less bloodshed than what that's led to over the centuries. I mean, if an argument about 300: Rise of an Empire can end in vehicular manslaughter... Hmm, we may be in trouble here. 

Stay safe, everybody.