UNABOMBER — Top Tier Cast, Mid Tier Movie

Review by Steve Barton II

Quite often when Hollywood makes biopics, the subject is often the hero or celebrated in some fashion. They also often make a notorious criminal take center stage and attempt to humanize them and use the nature versus nurture argument. In the case of the new Netflix movie Unabomber, director Janus Metz shows Ted Kaczynski from his youth and shows both the investigation around his case and flashbacks to his youth. Unabomber begins in 1994 and shows how brutally destructive his attacks were, before flashing back to him at 16 starting college early. The film constantly cross-cuts between the past and present, giving you a full understanding of how and why the Unabomber was created.

Bouncing between time periods constantly throughout a film isn’t an uncommon practice, but it’s difficult to pull off. You must be super meticulous with your sets and filling the scene with time-accurate props, clothing and even ways of speaking. In Unabomber, we move around in a nearly 30 year period constantly with very little delineation. The filming style is nearly identical with a locked off camera that rarely makes a dynamic motion and stays docile during what’s supposed to be a tension filled scene. Choices could’ve been made to display the time changes better whether it’s lower thirds to blatantly obvious levels or more creative ways like newspaper props or more of the archived news footage. The only real way to tell what time we’re currently in is seeing how the cast members are.

The cast of Unabomber is its largest attribute by miles. The star power Netflix got with this project should’ve been a knock out of the park, but instead it's barely a base hit. If you’ve been watching Jacob Tremblay since 2015’s Room, you know this kid has enormous talent. Whether it’s horror, comedy and everything in between, the young man gives it his all and makes the audience feel his emotions deeply. In Unabomber, Tremblay plays one of his most serious roles portraying a notorious killer who struggles to be socialized on every level. He plays an anti-social young man who was neglected and bullied by everyone including his mentor Henry Murray (Russell Crowe). Crowe as the college professor is perfect in his role as a nice guy on the surface, but a devious villain with ulterior motives underneath. His devilish charm is balanced with the genuine charm of Annabelle Wallis. The rest of the supporting cast with Shailene Woodley, Alexander Ludwig, Marc Menachaca and Steven Ogg as the FBI agents conducting the manhunt for the Unabomber. Shailene especially portrays a woman in the 90s who earned her way into the FBI with her education and specialty in linguistics, but her fellow male agents don’t respect her or her ideas. The patriarchal system in the 90s had no place for Joanne Miller, but she proved them all wrong.

Unabomber is far from being the worst movie of the year, but it had so much potential to be greater. The story around Ted becoming the Unabomber and how his mentors and others failed him is interesting, but it’s approaching the awkward Joker territory. It touches the area of almost justifying who he became and glorifying him. Someone with a fractured way of thinking could easily take the wrong messages away from Unabomber. While it may not have been the intention whatsoever to celebrate him, they should’ve gone to greater lengths to villainize Ted. The editing of the time periods could’ve been cleaner and a better movie is buried in this footage, but Unabomber still gets the job done of sharing the horrific true story of Ted Kaczynski.

Unabomber is available on Netflix starting September 25th!

Rating: 3/5