Movie Review: Unleashed

If you happen to see Unleashed, a martial-arts drama starring Jet Li, Morgan Freeman and Bob Hoskins, you may leave the theater thinking you've seen the year's strangest movie. We have a ways to go before we can award weirdness honors for 2005, but Unleashed already qualifies for the short list.

Part fable, part bruising martial-arts butt-kicker, part Scottish hoodlum movie, Unleashed tells the story of a brutalized man who's turned into a human attack dog by a Glasgow thug (Bob Hoskins).

Hoskins' Bart, a loan shark, uses Li's character - Danny the Dog - to beat the daylights out of those who don't pay their debts on time. When Bart removes a collar, the well-trained Danny flies into full attack rage, mercilessly pounding those who have refused to pay up.

Danny's life is nothing short of miserable. He's kept in a cage, where he has nothing but a well-thumbed children's book and a Teddy bear.

He's treated like an animal by Bart, who's trying very hard to be the world's least sensitive man and, by the look of things, is pretty much succeeding.

It gets stranger: When Danny meets a blind piano tuner (Freeman), he begins to understand that life may include pleasures beyond humiliation and violence; music and art begin to temper Danny's bestial impulses, a humanizing process that's aided by Freeman's stepdaughter (Kerry Condon).

Luc Besson, who wrote the screenplay for Unleashed, doesn't much care about conventional logic. Freeman and Condon play Americans visiting Scotland so that she can study piano. Guess she couldn't get into Juilliard.

When Danny escapes Bart's clutches, he moves in with Freeman and Condon and slowly begins to drop his guard. He learns about the joys of music and the wonders of ice cream, and the movie takes on a tone of goofy innocence.

Shot in a jittery, explosive style by director Louis Leterrier, Unleashed toys with ideas about the value of art. And although the movie can be gritty, it hardly qualifies as realistic. It's a violent fairy tale that includes fights to the death (watched by eager spectators) and lots of additional battles that are forced on the reluctant Danny as he tries to renounce the ways of violence.

Of course, the movie isn't entirely prepared to follow a similar course. The martial-arts choreography by Yuen Wo Ping (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) reaches wild, bruising levels. The fighting steps away from the more graceful battles that have marked some of Ping's recent work. Li's fighting has a kind of jackhammer urgency.

Hoskins happily slips into full growling sadism. Freeman (fresh from his Oscar turn in Million Dollar Baby) provides the film's wisdom, and Condon manages to come across in somewhat realistic fashion as a young pianist with braces who blossoms into a woman during the course of the movie.

Li does a nice job of playing a wild child who must accustom himself to the ways of the world. A little Mozart goes a long way in this regard.

Unleashed never entirely adjusts to any particular point of view. Its fight scenes have loads of energy, but its talkier moments are a trifle dull.

Moreover, it never worries too much about how weird it seems as it moves through a world that bears little resemblance to our own.

***