When broken down, modern-set martial arts movies are something of a simple breed. Usually, while the fights and choreography are blisteringly complex, the stories and tone that usually comes with them are fairly easy to dissect with only entries like Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon going into more nuanced territory while others concentrate solely on getting the bad guy or avenging a dead relative or partner. It’s not exactly a bad thing – while Gareth Evan’s The Raid does feature some twists and turns between the carnage, the fact that it’s a full-on, Die Hard-esque battle for survival means you’re free to focus fully on the brutal action.
This, in a round-about way, brings us to 2005’s Unleashed (aka. Danny The Dog in France), one of the many, tonally weird action flicks Luc Besson seemingly scripted over a weekend and produced on his days off that goes just as hard with eccentricity as it does with blunt, force trauma. Prepare yourself as we slip the collar off possibly the oddest martial arts film of the noughties.
Bart, a tyrannical loan shark with ideas far above his station, has figured out an ingenious – if highly inhumane – method to guarantee that people pay up when the time is right. You see, in his employ is Danny, a childlike, asian man who he’s trained to transform from a benign, mute soul into a skull cracking fucking animal the moment Bart slips the dog collar off and with Danny by his side Bart keeps the cash rolling in nicely.
However, despite being raised like a literal attack dog (he even sleeps in a cage and everything), there slight loopholes in Danny’s programming and Bart is growing steadily more impatient with his muscle’s inability to think for himself in pressure situations, especially when rival gangsters figure out that if Danny’s collar remains on, he remains about threatening as a stoned tellie tubby.
However, Bart is determined to make it to the big time in order to finally retire and when he’s invited to enter Danny in an underground fighting ring where deranged combatants fight to the death, his dreams of big money may finally be coming true.
That dream crashes and burns when Bart’s brutal ways catch up to him and a disgruntled gang boss attempts a hit on the portly shark, but when the smoke clears, Danny finds himself taken in by Sam, a blind, kindly piano tuner and his stepdaughter, Victoria, who open his eyes after years of physical and mental abuse while being treated like a sub human.
However, after a month of peace where Danny not only starts to rebuild his missing personality but even regains memories of his mother, Bart resurfaces and is adamant that he’s going to retrieve his dog in order to throw him back in the fighting pits to put some money into his retirement fund. Can Danny keep ahold of his newly acquired humanity when subjected once again to treatment designed to keep him an obedient killing machine.
No matter which way you slice it, Unleashed is fucking weird. On first glance, it plays around with the amnesiac ass kicker and tournament tropes, but once you dig a little deeper the movie almost carries a fairytale kind of vibe which presents us a gritty, grotty, mockney gangland that makes the stylised, urban universes created by Guy Ritchie look like Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. What’s even weirder about this, colour bleached world of thugs and concrete is that despite the appearance of Bob Hoskins exaggerating The Long Good Friday’s Harold Shand to an absurd degree, Unleashed is actually set in a Glasgow that somehow feature a single, main actor with a Scottish accent. Beyond delivering a version of Glasgow with no bloody Glaswegians in it, Besson’s script gets even more bizarre, tossing in unfunny comedic sidekicks to the constantly ranting Bart; underground fight clubs that contain combatants who dress like they’re cosplaying Escape From New York and the same type of gravity defying wire-fu that looks decidedly out of place in the presence of a game Hoskins.
Besson’s always skewed his action scripts on the eccentric side, but at times you’d swear he penned Unleashed while using a mad libs generator as the unrepentant randomness often grate on the nerves. Trying to fuse a tragic story of abuse with a gangster movie while taking time out to engage with some elaborate foot/fist action is an admirable task and is certainly an orginal mix, but the script’s attempt to clumsily join it all together feels as disjointed as channel hopping at three in the morning. It simply refuses to gel no matter how hard director Louis Leterrier tries to push the unconventional tone and while he frames some spirited (if a tad floaty) brawls, he seems genuinely unsure as how to approach the peculiar.
Still, at least his actors are fully game, even if they assemble to make possibly the most random cast ever seen in an action movie. Still mired in the American section of his career, action demigod Jet Li is obviously stoked to act as completely different to his usual fare that gives him an irregular character to sink his acting chops into. To give him his props, he does a great job and he balances the childish nature of Danny with the usual, violent graceful bludgeoning people have turned up to see. Elsewhere, not only does Bob Hoskins ham things up magnificently, verbally bollocking everyone within earshot and groping whores on top of Danny’s cage, but for some reason, Morgan Freeman has found himself involved in this movie as the big hearted, blind musician who takes Danny in. Like Hoskins, he seems to be playing a greatly exaggerated version of the type of wise man roles he’s usually famous for and he seems genuinely enjoying milking the whole sightless musician thing. However, a young Kerry Condon (The Banshees Of Inisherin) throws things even further into the realms of the bizarre as a eighteen year old, American music student who comes armed with an accent right out of Saved By The Bell. While she’s probably simply delivering a larger-than-life performance in order to try and match the tone, her character raises a couple of strange issues. You see, the script has her and Danny start up a romance, however, in the script Danny is supposed to be twenty while Li was creating forty when this movie was made which raises some uncomfortable issues if you are privy to said information. This, along with a legion of plot holes (Bart’s smart enough to train a human being to be an attack dog but hasn’t managed to work out the kinks in fifteen years?), keeps the movie just under the level required for a mindless watch.
Besson and Leterrier obviously are trying to make a martial arts fable that plays a little against the rules when compared to other balletic brawlers, but in doing so they’ve created an odd, unappealing, Frankenstein’s monster of a film that’s more than a confounding curiosity than the heartfelt actioner it’s trying to be.
Never mind unleashed, this film would have been better off being neutered.
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