Film Reviews

Unleashed

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Bob Hoskins
• Details: US / UK / 102 mins (18s).

Child-like and docile when kept on a leash, Danny (Li) becomes a vicious martial arts exponent when unleashed by Cockney gangster Bart (Hoskins). When Bart is ambushed by a rival gangster, Danny sees his chance to escape, and fetches up at the house of blind piano-tuner Sam (Freeman) and his teenage daughter Victoria (Condon). Treated with kindness for the first time in his life, Danny learns to trust and love, and even shows an affinity for the piano. But when Bart comes calling, Danny must go back into the seedy underworld where he is thrown into a gladiator's pit to fight or die. The American title for Unleashed is Danny the Dog, and that's about all you need to know. A one-legged, flea-bitten pitbull of a movie, this was written by Luc Besson, presumably during a bad case of night-sweats, and directed by Louis Leterrier (ironically enough), the man responsible for Transporter and the forthcoming Transporter 2. It's rare to see such a wholesale waste of talent but Jet Li and Bob Hoskins, both of whom have a limited range but possess remarkably expressive faces, are empty shells going through the motions. As for Morgan Freeman - even a blind piano-tuner wouldn't have touched this script with a twelve-foot tuning fork, particularly if he knew he'd be forced to say, "Sometimes people have to go back and fix the things that made them unhappy before they were happy." Anyone who actually enjoys this movie should seriously consider having themselves locked away.

Review by Declan Burke