As it stands, however, “Unleashed” serves its purpose in describing the central idea of the film. Jet Li plays Danny, a feral, warrior man-child who lives like a dog under the cruel hands of Bart (Bob Hoskins). Like a dog, he wears a collar around his neck signifying both property and obedience. When Bart removes the collar, Danny goes nuts and beats the crap out of anyone in the room.

Needless to say, Bart isn’t a very nice fellow. He’s bald and has a leering Glasgow accent. He yells at his underlings and takes photos of himself while having sex with whores. All this, plus he uses Danny as a means of collecting money from his numerous enemies, taunting rivals with the threat of taking Danny’s collar off. Of course, some refuse to pay and beautiful action sequences are thus born.

The weirdness comes when one day Bart is squeezing money from thugs who operate out of a piano warehouse. Danny is for some reason left alone in the storage area when Sam (Morgan Freeman) comes in to tune the piano. Sam is blind and can’t see that Danny is wearing a dog collar and is visibly distressed by having to talk to someone who isn’t his owner. Danny stands silent and conflicted but drawn to both the calmness of Sam’s voice and the beautiful sounds of the piano. (Danny loves pianos. It, like, you know, makes him more human and stuff.)

Sam coaxes Danny into sitting beside him at the piano bench, and they share an odd, interracial, older/younger, homoerotic scene with Sam massaging Danny’s hands and telling him to push the piano keys harder. “That’s it, harder!” says Sam. “Yessss,” replies Danny, giggly and virginal. For someone who is blind, Sam gives an odd amount of eye contact.

The film switches gears after Bart encounters some unfortunate car troubles, allowing Danny to escape and seek the care of Sam the Piano Man. Sam brings Danny to his home, where Danny wakes up bandaged and wearing fuzzy pyjamas. This is screenwriter Luc Besson’s forte – a stitched-together makeshift family, a strangely mature child or a strangely childlike adult on the verge of sexuality, and the threat of violence looming everywhere, threatening to tear apart the sense of home.

For a martial arts film, the film spends an inordinate amount of time establishing the family and developing their relationships. Unfortunately, the entire middle section of the film falls flat and drags the entire movie behind it. Morgan Freeman sleepwalks through his role, and who can blame him? The Wise Old Black Man—he’s been here before and several times too many at that. Sam’s adopted daughter, Victoria (Kerry Condon) is unfortunately miscast, giving the character a confusingly indeterminate age range. She seems somewhere between twelve and twenty-three, which was perhaps intended, but makes her romantic connection with Danny, who for all intents and purposes is mentally challenged, all the more out of place and unsettling.

This is a family of outsiders if ever there was one. A blind benevolent black man, a smart plucky girl with braces and short hair, and an Asian dog, all with a penchant for classical music and ice cream, all on the run from a white male villain dressed in a clean white suit (in this film, the bad guys wear white).

Unleashed would be such a smart film if its surface story didn’t seem so lazily written. Sam brings Danny shopping and teaches him how to tap melons. Danny thus spends a lot of the film tapping things and calling them ripe. “Ripe means sweet, and sweet means gooood!” he says. Victoria teaches Danny how to eat ice cream, and Danny spends a couple of sequences saying, “Vanilla is gooood!” And so on.

So much of the film depends on the establishment of these characters as a believable family, but it never happens. Part of the problem is that they accept Danny from the get-go. In Victoria’s first meeting with Danny, he is scared and hiding under a bed. She prances into the room, crouches down on the floor, and talks to Danny as if she’s known him her whole life. The film could have done well by establishing a sense of people growing to love each other, instead of positing a wonderfully PC rainbow family who seemingly would love any weirdo that waltzed into their bedroom.

The best character development occurs within Yuen Wo Ping’s fight choreography. Unleashed sports a different style for Ping, more violent and less ballet-like, wherein Danny fights viscously and efficiently. Mirroring the way Danny learns about the world around him, when Danny lands a hit he attempts the same technique four more times. “Vanilla is gooood!” These sequences best get into the mind of Danny, where you can see his physical virility, his childlike innocence, his animal instincts, and his love for peace and happiness, all in the same sequence of right elbows to the face.

The end fight sequence is particularly apt, with Danny literally using his “home” to escape the villains, crawling through the walls and ceilings. This is all while Sam and Victoria hide shivering in the closet, and just after Bart has referenced Sigmund Freud with his cronies.

In the end, the subtexts of Unleashed stay under wraps, hidden beneath layers of clunky storytelling. If Danny were to tap this movie, he might say it were sweet. But then again, Danny thinks everything is sweet.

Jef is a Halfway Staff Writer. All stills in this article are property of Rogue Pictures.

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