If the collar comes off, duck !
‘Unleashed’ or as it is also known, ‘Danny the Dog’ , is Jet Li’s latest ass kicker, a movie with stellar fights scenes and bone crunching action from renown choreographer Yuen Wo Ping (Matrix trilogy, Kung Fu Hustle ), a top notch support cast from Morgan Freeman, Bob Hoskins, and Kerry Condon (recently viewed in the TV opus ‘Rome’ ), and a superb score by Massive Attack and the RZA, all taughtly directed by ‘The Transpoter’ helmer Louis Leterrier from Luc Besson’s mighty pen. But it is none of these that are solely responsible for making the movie work so well. Instead it is Li’s dramatic role of Danny, transforming him from a snarling mongrel of a killing machine to being almost human that ties everything together.
Li plays Danny, a pit bull that enforces the will of small time loan shark Bart (Hoskins reminiscent of his ‘Long Good Friday’ role), and unleashes Danny on anyone that does not come up with the goods, he is a tool and the lethal muscle that Bart can’t do without. To Bart, Danny is not a human, and is treated as such as after each encounter he gets his collar replaced before being locked back up in his kennel. But when his boss is gunned down and believed dead, Danny is in territory that is as alien and as foreign as another planet. Forced to think for himself he looks for solace in the only person who has shown him a moment’s kindness.
Sam (Freeman) is a blind piano tuner living in Glasgow with his young daughter Victoria (Condon). There life seems normal and comparatively quite until Danny comes into their life. Bloodied and hurt from the gunfight he believed his boss and master died in, Danny is put to rest and so begins the relationship at the heart of the movie. Sam and Victoria take to Danny and show him some of the simplicities of life itself and how to live in it.
But Bart is not dead and Danny can’t simply be replaced, years have gone in to grooming him into the machine he has become. From an early age Bart has taken everything away from the young boy, and then trained to do his master’s bidding. There is no place he can hide, no place that will be left uncovered in his search to get his muscle back.
Danny is starting to find happiness and comfort for the first time in many years, but where there is happiness, sadness is never far away, and doors from his tragic past are unlocked along the way.
This movie is quite different from what Li has done before, with most of the same crew as on ‘Kiss of the Dragon’ this has lost none of the slickness of that outing but merely from being shot in Glasgow it adds a whole different dimension from what we are used to on the big screen. These are not the well tread streets of New York, London, Tokyo, or even Paris, just think how many other action movies have been shot in the Scottish city more commonly associated with gritty downbeat period dramas or replacing Edinburgh in ‘Trainspotting’ . Although, the strange thing being, that there is not one person in any of the events that speaks with a Scottish brogue. The fight scenes too are quite unique, gone are the slick and stylish martial arts that we are accustomed to, Danny as the title suggests is a dog, not a well honed fighter, and as such fights in the most efficient, quickest and dirtiest way possible to get his opponent on the ground, mostly wincing from some broken appendage.
Ok, there are a few grumbles here too, Freeman’s character being blind but being able to see into other’s hearts more clearly than anyone else is a little clichéd. The lack of any police through out all the proceedings, including car explosions and automatic weapons fire, does not speak highly of the Strathclyde Police force either. As for the pit fight, this seems to shout out for a Jean-Claude Van Damme appearance rather than the grittiness of Liam Neeson’s ‘The Big Man’ , but these all come across as being very minor indeed.
The extras on offer are a mixed batch. There is a very competent making of featurette, a batch of deleted scenes, some extended fight work, and the cast all get to giggle in outtakes that has Li laughing and Freeman taking his blind character a little too literally. The CG featurette is a bit of a non starter, showing only a small CG shot of a camera panning into a piano, it may work fine in the context of the movie and look groovy, but here out of context, it seems pointless despite its short length. The music video ‘Baby Boy’ by the RZA completes this quotient.
Sit back and have some fun, you know you want to.
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