Unleashed: Unrated

Photo Credit: Copyright ©2005 Universal Studios Home Entertainment.

 
“You pay it back, the collar stays on. You don’t pay it back, the collar comes off,” says Uncle Bart (Bob Hoskins) to his indentured servant, Danny (Jet Li). Bart is your typical gangster in white—dangerous beyond reason or practicality. He keeps Danny on a leash, or a collar, rather, as a Pavlovian means of controlling Danny’s immense power, strength and speed as a fighter.

Bart uses Danny to settle scores with various people who owe him money. He took him in since childhood and trained him to be a killer. “Danny the Dog,” they call him (which was the original working title for the film). All but vanished from Danny’s memory are his childhood and his mother, whom he remembers only in faint flashbacks from which he eventually tries to piece together what happened to her.

One particular meeting between Bart and one of his borrowers goes badly when the debtor figures out that Danny is the muscle and is only triggered when the collar comes off. At the next collection, Bart has the idea of using a strobe light to alert Danny (in the next room) to come into the meeting so Bart can remove the collar and set him on the debtors.

Danny, however, is distracted by the pianos in the basement of this antique shop. While waiting for the signal from Bart, he meets Sam (Morgan Freeman), a blind man who tunes the pianos. Sam asks Danny to help him out. Clearly something about music seems to click with Danny. It’s intriguing how the story unfolds as to explain what it is and why.

It’s odd, because my initial thought from the set up at the beginning was that this would be yet another martial-arts action film, but my expectations were beaten by a left turn that isn’t made simply for the sake of clever diversion. There’s still enough action to be had, for sure, and there is an elaborate final sequence in which Danny’s instincts erupt in a series of fantastic stunts filmed at unusual angles demonstrating, as in “Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior,” that real skills and not just wires and trickery were involved in the filming of these sequences. Still, the film becomes most interesting not because of the completely unexpected accident that changes everything, but because of what happens afterward.

Rather than spoil it for those who haven’t seen, I’ll say that circumstances cause Danny to be freed from Bart and this is where the film diverges from the conventional plot of a lesser movie. Danny wakes up to find himself at Sam’s house, in his care. The story is that Sam’s best friend died, and he married the widow to look after her and her child, Victoria (Kerry Condon).

Victoria is clearly taken by Danny’s innocence and shyness. She takes him to an ice-cream parlor. Now, as I’m saying this, I realize this is perhaps the first of his films in which I’ve actually seen Jet Li smile. There’s a charming chemistry between Li and Kerry Condon on-screen that transports your mind far away from the elaborate fight choreography-driven action you’ve come to expect from a Jet Li film. Victoria’s a youthful soul. She resonates well with Danny in a way that cleverly avoids that voice, always nagging, inside Hollywood’s head–the one that seems to always convince directors to turn every male-female interaction into a sexual inferno.

Danny’s blissful situation with Sam and Victoria is eventually interrupted when he runs into one of Bart’s henchmen. Danny returns to Bart wanting to know what happened to his mother. Having witnessed Danny in action, a mysterious, serpentine man persuades Bart to make Danny fight in a ring to the death for financial gain. Having seen what else the world holds outside the life of violence in which Danny was brought up, he cannot fight adversaries in the ring. However, Bart’s determined to profit from Danny’s abilities.

There’s nothing particularly complicated about the plot that follows and how Danny regains his memories… it’s largely that of similarly-themed films about regaining one’s innocence or memory, or both. Yet the core of it is driven by performances by Hoskins, Freeman, Condon and, surprisingly, Li. Where Li’s grasp of English could otherwise hamper his performance, here he works within it, and rather effectively, given the nature of the Danny–uncertain and nervous about a world that is entirely unknown to him.

I can’t particularly comment on the unrated vs. rated cut (I watched only the unrated version). However, there can’t be much of a difference, except for a few exceedingly bloody contact shots. If they cut more than that from the rated version, they might as well have omitted entire fight scenes that are pretty consistent in their degree of violence with the occasional exception.

The bonus features on tis DVD are only mildly interesting. There are two main extras, cobbled together from very brief interview bits which serve as nothing more than introductions to long excerpts from the film that most people will have already seen before they view the extras, anyway. Even worse, some of the interview bits are used in both featurettes. Still, the DVD is worth a rental for the movie–definitely worth a viewing if you haven’t seen it.

 
Bonus Materials (Unrated Version)

• SERVE NO MASTER – Get inside the fight sequences created by legendary action choreographer Yuen Wo Ping.
• THE COLLAR COMES OFF – Go behind the scenes with the stars and filmmakers of Unleashed.
• INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR LOUIS LETERRIER
• MASSIVE ATTACK AND THE RZA MUSIC VIDEOS

Unleashed: Unrated • Running Time: 1 hour 42 minutes • DVD Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 (Anamorphic) • Dolby® Digital 5.1-channel surround sound encoding • MPAA Rating: Not Rated. • Distributed by Universal Studios Home Entertainment