Unleashed

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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Year:	2005
Country of origin:	France / US / UK
Director:	Louis Leterrier
Genre:	Brit martial art gangster comedy crime confusion thingy
Starring:	Jet Li, Bob Hoskins, Morgan Freeman, Kerry Condon
Rating:	3/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0342258/
Tagline:	Serve No Master
Favourite line:	"If you can't do what I've trained you to do, what fucking use are you? No fucking use is the answer. No fucking use at all."

What a strange film.

Jet Li plays Danny, a man taught from an early age to serve Bob Hoskins' Bart. Li is treated, quite literally, like a dog, with a leash around his neck, fed scraps from the floor and kept in a cage beneath the floor. The only time he is ever freed from the leash is when Bart wants him to commit violence against his enemies, of which there are many.
When Bart is shot in an organised hit, Danny escapes, and begins to build a new life with the kindness and help of blind piano tuner Sam (Morgan Freeman) and his step-daughter Victoria, who teach him that life is not all about violence, pain and suffering.
But the good times can only last so long and, once a fully recovered Bart finds him again, Danny must choose between his new life, and protecting his new friends.

Schizophrenic, with a confused, almost staccato directorial style, this is part martial art movie, part Brit-gangster flick and part 'fish out of water' gentle comedy. Each of the individual elements, it must be stressed, is successful in its own right, but somehow the movie as a whole just doesn't hang together particularly comfortably, lurching as it does from one section to the next, with no real sense of cohesion.
Still, it was engaging enough, and kept the interest level up to the end, so it can't be awful.
It just wasn't at all what I expected.