Unhinged

"I'm the bad guy?" Michael Douglas asked under the skin of working stiff turned directionless vigilante Bill Foster in Falling Down. He was convinced of the rightness of his actions, stunned when it sunk in that he was the villain of his own story. For audiences trained to believe the protagonist was automatically the hero, it took a while to understand that they were meant to empathize not sympathize with him. There'll be no such concerns about Tom Cooper (Crowe, bulbous and belligerent), the bullying Southern-accented thug who decides to take the bad day of his own creation out on recently divorced Rachel (Pistorius). There might have been an element of support for Cooper when the harrassed single mom cuts him off at a light, but since he was just driving away from murdering his ex-wife and her lover, then burning down the house, sympathy is in short supply. That's when she becomes the target of his abstract wrath at an unjust world that he thinks has let him down, and he's going to teach her a bloody, and predictable, lesson - one that hits close to home after he steals her cell phone and contact list.

Director Derrick Borte (The Joneses) came closer to black comedy with similar material in last year's similarly themed American Dreamer. Here, it feels like the points of a much smarter and incisive script are buried under a more conventional hide-and-seek chase thriller - one that Borte executes incredibly well. The path of carnage that Tom wreaks is brutal, and every car crash this lunatic causes, every time he forces someone to unwillingly commit some sin, is an act of pure, bone crunching force. Crowe, never known for nuance, dispatches all subtlety with this pain-pill-addicted bulldozer of a man, working through some idiotic morality, sometimes even manipulating others into slaughter like some cut-rate Jigsaw Killer.

Less a morality tale than a cautionary one, under the "Chekov's candy-colored craft scissors" rote script there is still some critique of modern culture, and there aren't easy answers: Rachel and Tom are both having terrible days, but that doesn't make their responses equal. When it comes to heroism, one attempted savior gets run over for his act of charity, while an entire diner full of customers stares at their eggs or through their phones as a murder takes place in front of them. All in all, it's a bleak lesson in civility: don't honk your horn, because you just never know who you're honking at.