Unleashed English Movie
In its bewildering mix of violence and music "Unleashed" (which also goes by the unlikely though apt title of "Danny The Dog") reminds you of Luc Besson's "Le Femme Nikita" where the assassin slays an entire family while playing the violin.
If it was violins and violence in "La Femme Nikita", it is the piano and punches in "Unleashed", as Hong Kong superstar Jet Li goes for a complete image revamp.
Of course he throws punches and kicks butt like a mobile action machine. But here the violence is repugnant and avoidable.
Jet Li's character Danny is a glorified slave, a fighting concubine for the growling Glasgow gangster Bart (Bob Hoskins) who has Danny on a leash... just like the director has the narrative in his control.
The savagery of the gladiatorial fights is well-balanced against the beauty of the world that Danny encounters when he runs into a blind piano teacher (Morgan Freeman) and his protégée Victoria (Kerry Condon).
The contrast between Danny's inherited world of underground violence and adopted world of simple sublime pleasures (eating an ice-cream, tinkling on the piano keys) is splendidly balanced out in this evenly written exposition on violence and music.
One of the joys of watching this surprisingly well-assembled pastiche of passion and fury is to watch a major action star revise his image.
Jet Li's hesitant petrified and yet sure-footed efforts to grapple with his troubled character's inner and outer worlds is a pleasure to watch. He's equally adept at expressing anger and anguish.
A lot of the film's effective emotional projection must be attributed to Pierre Morel's scintillating cinematography. He films the fury and fragility of Danny's turmoil like a flamboyant ballet... showy and yet reined-in, spectral yet sober, anarchic yet harmonious.
Besides Jet Li, the two character actors - Bob Hoskins and Morgan Freeman - representing the yin and yang of human desire are in exceptional form. When Hoskins is finally under the hero's heel, Freeman silences the villain with a caustic statement - "That man was talking a whole lot of shit."
The pedestrian and the profound are strangely wedded in this soul-searching drama of the damned and the redeemed.
The kernel of gentle poetry emerges from the folds of violence like a flower opening its petal. To dismiss "Unleashed" as one more martial arts film from Jet Li's haul of flame seems unreasonable.
This film must be seen for its gritty synthesis of love and loathing, lust and lyricism, fist and feeling.
MOVIE REVIEWS