Viraj's Weblog

I am not a big fan of Jet Li's blockbuster movies, however I do like his lesser known films. I felt like seeing a movie and saw that something called Unleashed was playing. After seeing the trailer it looked very interesting, and then I found out it was written by Luc Besson who wrote Leon The Professonal and La Femme Nikita. I knew it had to be good. His movies are usually about people ostracized from society but extremely talented in some brutal way.

It's basically about the Jet Li character being raised like a dog as a fighting machine. He soon becomes unleashed and gets to learn like a child what the world is about. It's a very dark movie at times, with Bob Hoskins playing an incredibly evil and convincing character. It's also a love story and has its sensitive sides. The fight scenes are exceptional, and it reminded me of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. There is a moving scene where after the Jet character experiences love and music, he is put in a pit to fight to death and tells his tormentor he no longer wishes to hurt people. Of course this only works for so long, with him only defending blows. But once the limits are pushed, the wild dog comes out again.

There is one very cool fight scene which I've never seen anything like before. It's a fight within a very claustrophobic bathroom. The walls are so close that just reaching back to throw a punch requires hitting a wall. The cinematography on this scene is pretty amazing.

The movie has alot of piano music in it, Mozart, etc. The character learns that he loves music. It was a great movie, but there were some teenagers in the theatre who pretty much were heckling the film and its music at the end. Throughtout the movie the music is by Massive Attack which are uptempo Matrix-like songs. It's still an extremely brutal film, so I'm wondering what sort of satisfaction these viewers were looking for.