When I first saw the trailer for Unleashed I thought it looked like an interesting idea and the narrative seemed a good excuse for Jet Li to show off his formidably fighting skills. Essentially, Li’s character, Danny, has been in the possession of his ‘uncle’ from a young age (so young he can’t remember his mother) and has been trained to fight and kill on command. He is treated as and live like a dog; at the beck and call of his master, locked in a cage overnight, barely fed and generally ignored. His master is Bart (played by Bob Hoskins) a loan shark/racketeer who uses Danny to help him collect money he’s owed by less-than-respectable businessmen. On one such collection things go bad and Danny does his thing (he’s passive until someone removes his collar, then all hell breaks loose), he impresses one of the bystanders who happens to run an underground fighting contest where the gladiators fight to the death.
One the way back from his first successful fight, Bart’s car is hit and everyone shot, Danny escapes and falls into the hands of a blind piano tuner (Morgan Freeman) who he met briefly while out on a collection. With the help of his step daughter, he nurses Danny back to health and help him learn how to live a normal life. Then Bart re-appears and Danny must choose between his old life and the new one.
The film kind of passed me by on it’s initial release, but a friend of mine is a huge Jet Li fan and was raving about how much he enjoyed it, so I rented a copy to see if he was right. I can see why it didn’t do as well as usual with the Jet Li crowd. There’s a large gap in the middle where the patheic-looking Li is learning how to do things like eat ice-cream and tell a ripe melon from an unripe one. On either side of it are some of the fastest, most brutal fight scenes I’ve ever watched. Where his character is quiet, timid and shuffles around with the collar on, he becomes and fighting machine with it off.
I have to say that I liked the two opposing parts of the narrative and it turned it from a brainless fight-fest into something more. It could have been handled differently, with the switch between the two worlds Danny inhabits being a bit smoother and some more tension created by putting his new ‘family’ under some sort of direct threat, but if you’re after a fight-flick with some thought, take a look.
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