In Unleashed, Danny (Jet Li) is a literal human attack dog, trained by his mobster boss/father/master Bart (a maniacal Bob Hoskins) to remain obedient while wearing his collar, and to mercilessly maim and kill when his metal neck restraint is removed. It’s a pulpy premise of near-ludicrous proportions, and it gets even sillier when Danny, having seemingly been freed from Bart’s psychotic control after a car crash, takes up residence with a wise, blind piano tuner named Sam (Morgan Freeman) and his gawky, braces-adorned fifteen-year-old stepdaughter Victoria (Kerry Condon). Yet despite such absurdity, Louis Leterrier’s (The Transporter 2) outrageously melodramatic action flick nonetheless benefits from an unabashedly sentimental heart – the middle 45-minutes forming a tender and touching portrait of Danny’s mental and emotional reconstitution back into a person – and Li’s whirligig martial arts acrobatics (especially during a fight in an insanely narrow bathroom). And in its story of a man transformed into a non-thinking, non-emoting creature of vicious physicality, Unleashed also surprisingly winds up shrewdly paralleling Li’s own stateside career, which – until this gritty genre gem – has been defined mainly by pathetic urban-oriented films in which the legendary Chinese star is reduced to little more than a spinning, kicking, punching wind-up toy.
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