May 13, 2005

UNLEASHED (a.k.a. DANNY THE DOG) is a movie I reviewed when it came out 20 years ago, but unlike MINDHUNTERS I’ve rewatched it a few times over the years. In fact I found some notes and screengrabs from an unfinished review when I last watched it in 2021. It’s a truly international creation, an English-language Jet Li vehicle co-starring American Morgan Freeman, produced and directed by Frenchmen, choreographed by Hong Kong legend Yuen Woo-ping and filmed and set in Glasgow, Scotland, but it feels like it has a unified vision, a very specific take on how to make a 2005 action movie with a big heart.

Li plays Danny, a feral person raised in a cage by the cruel gangster Bart (Bob Hoskins, SUPER MARIO BROS.) and trained to be his attack dog. When Bart needs to intimidate debtors or enemies he simply removes Danny’s metal collar and he will go ape shit, destroying everyone in the room with blunt martial arts savagery. Danny is severely traumatized – is he also developmentally disabled in some way? This is never discussed, but for whatever reason he’s very childlike, and he doesn’t know to yearn for a better life until he happens to find one after Bart is attacked by rivals and seemingly killed.

I still think of this as an action movie riff on EDWARD SCISSORHANDS. This strange creation with dangerous capabilities but a gentle, artistic soul is raised in seclusion, then catastrophe puts him with this nice family who teach him basic things about life. And he’s even comically terrified by, then has an innocent crush on, the daughter. The big thematic difference is that the world he comes from is the evil one, and then the community he comes into is genuinely accepting and good for him. It’s actually a more optimistic story than Tim Burton’s fairy tale – it believes Danny is compatible with this world and can have the life he wants, not just hide away in a castle and be remembered by Winona Ryder in old age.

People only looking for fights might hate the pacing, but I love the novelistic structure of it, the willingness to start as this unhinged gangster story that has just dipped its toes into underground fighting when suddenly it takes a sharp turn to fully immerse you in a sweet non-violent story for a while. I’ve almost forgotten it’s an action movie by the time his past comes crashing back and he has to fight for a life of not fighting. I used to think that sort of thing was a storytelling problem, when you came to see Jet Li kick people and then are told how terrible it is that he has to kick people, putting what you want to see in the movie and what you want to happen to the character at odds. But increasingly I think it’s an interesting conflict, a tension between us and the movie, us and Danny, our id and our heart.

The initial premise is so wonderfully crazy – this gangster in his white suit so arrogantly dominating people because of this diabolical idea to turn a man into an animal. In my 2021 notes I wondered if it was written for a big scary dude like a wrestler. It’s unclear how Bart got this poor kid to fight so well, or how he even knew it was a possibility. But the movie works because it utilizes the 2005 conventional wisdom that nothing is more powerful than Jet Li’s moves. And it was a brilliant way to find new dimensions to Li’s acting without language being a hurdle. He creates such an unusual character through his emoting and all of his physicality even aside from his fighting style.

I love that as monstrous as Bart is he seems to have deluded himself into believing he’s a good pet owner. I guess he’s no different from many slave owners or Nazis, or even far less evil people who just kinda suck but take pride in how supposedly nice they are to the people they exploit. Bart seems happy to feed Danny a chunk of meat after he beats some people up. He seems offended when Danny finds people who will treat him as a person, like he’s being ungrateful. Also he’s used to his own behavior and doesn’t think about hiding it too much, leading to the scene where a call girl flees him after looking down through a metal grate during sex and seeing Danny in his cage.

UNLEASHED also follows the 2005 conventional wisdom that no one is more lovable than Morgan Freeman. His achievements earlier in the year included winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for MILLION DOLLAR BABY and narrating MARCH OF THE PENGUINS. There was no better choice to play Sam, a blind piano tuner who meets Danny by chance and pretty much talks to him like Mr. Rogers, enlisting his help with a piano as an excuse to make a connection through music. Soon he provides him first aid and a place to live, avoids pushing him to speak or explain too much, teaching him simple things like how to buy groceries, telling him he’s a member of the family, and meaning it.

Of course there’s always a lingering danger, hints of Danny’s past through things he says unknowingly, or not reacting at all to a violent incident at the store. And whenever Sam or his stepdaughter Victoria (Kerry Condon, ANGELA’S ASHES) broach the subject of the collar we have to wonder if they’d be in danger if it came off.

I get very involved in his new life, I want him to make it work, then he runs into his old associates and finds out his “uncle” Bart is still alive and looking for him. Suddenly he’s back in the cage, back in the underground fighting, battling a bunch of spiky-haired X-treme dudes (including a post-SPECIAL FORCES but pre-anybody-knowing-his-name Scott Adkins) in an emptied-out swimming pool. He tries to make it work from his new perspective, fighting only defensively for as long as he can, though this is not an acceptable compromise for these bad people. Great stuff.

In the car Bart tries his old bullshit on the new Danny, with different results. He tells him families need to stick together, not realizing that Danny has a new family he’d rather stick together with, and this inspires Danny to grab the steering wheel, crash the car, pull the collar off and leave it and his “owner” behind.

So the last section is the action pay off, when Bart comes after Danny and Danny uses his violence powers hopefully for the last time to protect his new family and freedom. These are some great sequences in his neighborhood, including a chase onto a roof, where he kicks a punk rocker’s head into a chimney so hard it knocks out a section of bricks, which he them nimbly leaps through to drop into the building.

Their surroundings are frequently smashed and crumbled – at one point Danny yanks a hanging light out of the ceiling so he can climb up into the hole it leaves, scurry through the crawl space and drop into another room.

Action director Yuen was on one of the all time great runs, coming off of CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON, THE MATRIX RELOADED, KILL BILL and KUNG FU HUSTLE. Jesus christ, man. A genius at the pinnacle. Here he gives us a distinct, barbaric fighting style to fit the character – Li’s usually fluid movements shift to brutal pounding, pummeling, even biting. We know from Adkins’ interviews that at least for the pool fight they worked Hong Kong style, with Yuen shooting action sequences separately of director Louis Leterrier (in his sophomore film after THE TRANSPORTER, where he was credited as “artistic director” under director Corey Yuen [no relation]).

The best fight is an extended chase and duel with a bald martial artist (Mike Lambert, BLACK MASK, WHO AM I?, KNOCK OFF) wearing a baggy all white outfit with a long robe like some sort of guru. He’s never explained or named, only credited as “The Stranger,” but obviously there’s gotta be some story behind this dude and why Bart knows him. The STAR WARS approach.

Danny gets knocked out the window of an apartment building and dangles from a wire, which gets cut when The Stranger throws a machete at him, so he uses it to swing down swashbuckler style into a bathroom window, trying to sneak out without the poor showering woman noticing him, but The Stranger (who seems to have a very impressive understanding of the layout of this building) punches through the door and battles him right there. They batter each other between narrow walls, making many dents and holes.

I like how there’s a little story in the location here, the lady in the shower is apparently an artist, so there are plaster sculptures to be destroyed by their battle. I happen to love this cliche, which fits especially well with this story, that acts of violence cause destruction to symbols of art and culture, in this case including books and a CD collection. Bart makes the subtext text when he sees where Danny has been living and what he’s been enjoying. “Art? Books? Music? For what? Did it make you a better person?”

Uh, actually, yeah, it did. And there’s another discover that really offends him:

“Pajamas. Fucking pajamas!? You ungrateful little bastard!”

Now, it must be noted that UNLEASHED comes from the mind of writer/producer Luc Besson, and is clearly of a piece with his other works. I called him a “perv” in my original review and even though we mostly knew the same stuff about him then that we know about him now it’s only after rape accusations (that he’s been legally cleared of) that many, including myself, have started to feel like oh shit, should I really be supporting this guy? So, you know, I saw most of his movies up until DOGMAN.

There has rarely been a less surprising case of “oh it turns out that guy’s a creep,” and yet it didn’t used to stop me from watching his movies. As skeezed out as I always was by LEON/THE PROFESSIONAL’s central relationship, I couldn’t help but enjoy that movie or of course THE FIFTH ELEMENT, as well as less celebrated ones like THE MESSENGER, THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF ADELE BLANC-SEC, LUCY, VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS and ANNA. More to the point here, I appreciated what he did through his production company EuropaCorp, coming up with cool action ideas to farm out to his acolytes including Leterrier and Pierre Morel (who was cinematographer here but directed DISTRICT B13 and TAKEN). So that’s an art/artist separation question I wrestle with. No question he made movies I like, but that’s a bad reason to look the other way. There’s a line you have to draw for yourself between what is just experiencing art that already exists and what is being too complacent about things you’re against.

As far as the actual content of this specific movie, it still seems to me like Condon (who was in her early twenties at the time) might be playing a teenager, but her relationship with Danny is so innocent and non-sexual that it wouldn’t raise any red flags without the context of who wrote it. They’re more like siblings than a couple. Anyway, it had to be discussed. I’m changing the subject now.

One thing that’s very thankfully European about the movie is that it lacks the nu-metal type soundtracks of some of the other aughts Jet Li movies. I don’t think the score by Massive Attack is a classic, but it’s consistent, and is injected with pleasing bits of diegetic piano music, such as Sam playing “Round Midnight.” So it doesn’t feel dated in the way some of the other movies from the same time do.

You know what’s weird, the DVD I watched (unrated version) had a card at the beginning saying that the music is by Massive Attack and the end credits music is by the RZA. Then the end credits have one song that sounds kind of trip-hoppy but apparently really was produced by RZA. They list that and another RZA song which does not play, but in my original review I mention the two RZA songs on the end credits. Weird. The DVD includes a video for the missing song, “Unleash Me” featuring Prodigal Sunn and Christ Bearer, which digitally composites RZA into scenes from the movie. Or scenes from the movie into him. I believe it’s his only video featuring Bob Hoskins, but hopefully some day he’ll do a song about ROGER RABBIT or MERMAIDS, and then he’ll have another chance.

Anyway in lieu of trying to be edgy and modern via Korn they have some pretty funny quasi-punk individuals populating the underground fighting community, both fighters and gamblers. And the gamblers, man do they enjoy watching humans kill each other. They get so excited when things escalate and battle axes come out and shit. Look at these weirdos:

I love it.

UNLEASHED did okay box office and got pretty good reviews, including a three-star one from Roger Ebert, who called it “ingenious in its construction” and noted that “So many action movies are made on autopilot that I am grateful when one works outside the box.”

It’s true – it came with no box, no instructions, but what it did was self-explanatory. To say it’s my favorite western Jet Li movie isn’t that huge of a compliment, but I can go bigger than that. The more I watch it the more I think it’s some kind of a minor classic.

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Legacy: I haven’t noticed UNLEASHED having any sort of influence, but obviously many of its participants have gone on to do notable works. Soon Leterrier graduated to blockbuster journeyman by directing forgotten MCU building block THE INCREDIBLE HULK (2008), and widely-hated-but-I-liked-it CLASH OF THE TITANS (2010). We last saw him as the only white guy to direct a FAST & FURIOUS sequel after Justin Lin quit FAST X. Condon was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her great role in THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (2022). And of course Pool Fighter Adkins soon played Yuri Boyka in UNDISPUTED II: LAST MAN STANDING (2006), beginning his ascent to action icon. He actually reunited with Leterrier playing the thug who gets called “Ukrainian Ben Affleck” in THE BROTHERS GRIMSBY (2016).

Other western martial arts movies released theatrically in 2005: ELEKTRA, TRANSPORTER 2 (also directed by Leterrier!), and that’s it. (There were DTV ones though including Seagal’s INTO THE SUN, SUBMERGED, TODAY YOU DIE and BLACK DAWN.)