Directed by Janus Metz Pedersen — Screenplay by Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves.
When I first heard of this Netflix title, I was instantly interested. Here was a crime drama based on a true story from Danish director Janus Metz Pedersen. Pedersen’s strong work in television shows — episodes of True Detective, ZeroZeroZero, and Andor — has made him a director whose career I’m really interested in following. On top of that, this project featured a strong cast, including screen star Russell Crowe and Jacob Tremblay, the child actor from Room, Good Boys, and Doctor Sleep, who is now trying to prove himself again as an actor in his late teens. I was hoping for something akin to Netflix’s Mindhunter, but this is, unfortunately, quite far from the quality of that iconic two-season series. Unabomber is the kind of film that is trying to be too many things at once, while not being particularly good at any of those things.
Janus Metz Pedersen’s Unabomber is a two-track film that cross-cuts between two timelines, both centering, in their own ways, on the story of Ted Kaczynski, a domestic terrorist, also known as the ‘Unabomber,’ who killed multiple people by mailing bombs to them over the course of multiple decades. In 1958, we meet a 16-year-old Ted Kaczynski (played by Jacob Tremblay). Though socially awkward, he jumps at the opportunity to partake in a debate club-type experimental psychology study at Harvard conducted by Professor Henry Murray (played by Russell Crowe). This young man dreams of becoming a philosopher, and he idolizes Murray, but soon he learns that Murray may have ulterior motives beyond merely mentoring him. While that story is ongoing, the film also shows us the 1995 investigation that led up to Kaczynski’s capture. These scenes feature FBI Agent Joanne Miller front and center as she tries to get her co-workers to take her seriously and recognize that they should look at the phrases in the Unabomber’s manifesto to find him.
I am honestly quite surprised this film doesn’t work better than it does. It’s got an experienced European filmmaker in the director’s chair, and a talented cast admirably trying to make this film into something more than it is. On top of that, both Yves Bélanger, the cinematographer of Brooklyn, and Marco Beltrami, the composer of The Hurt Locker, are attached to the project. Sometimes all the right ingredients can be in place, but the final meal can still turn out to be a disappointment. Such is the case with this film.
In some ways, it is a tale of two halves, with the 1958 section working much better than the mid-90s one. In the 1958 storylines, the debate experiments are gripping, and Russell Crowe leaps off the screen. The screen legend lends the film gravitas, and he always holds your attention. Admittedly, there were times, especially in the early scenes, when Tremblay’s performance didn’t work for me. As he said his lines, I felt that I could see the lines on the page. I also felt that the little voice cracks that Tremblay deliberately brings forth to emphasize his character’s youth became quite distracting in the first act. However, as the film progressed, I felt Tremblay’s performance started to work better and better. Tremblay and Crowe’s scenes are, far and away, the most interesting scenes in the film. That said, there are still scenes here that lack the authenticity of a truly gripping film. For instance, there is a dinner scene with the Kaczynski family that just did not work, and there’s a moment of unintentional comedy in the utilization of Beltrami’s music in a scene where Kaczynski is on a date.
But while some things work relatively well in the 1950s origin-story type of narrative, very little works in the mid-90s section. The first few minutes of the film feature the most gripping scene of this half of the film, in which we follow one of the Unabomber’s packages from a mailbox into a house, before it explodes. There’s a solid shot from inside the mailbox, and the explosion sets the tone well from the start of the film. However, then the film gets lost in archival news footage meant to serve as a way to dump information on audiences and establish how long law enforcement had been trying to find him. Still, the film doesn’t properly give you the feeling that this was the longest manhunt in FBI history. It fails in that regard. It doesn’t help that all of the law enforcement characters are paper-thinly written, or that the digital look of the film — and one or two miscast characters — takes away from the verisimilitude of the period setting.
You could say that Janus Metz Pedersen’s Unabomber is a tale of two halves. One of those halves works relatively well, while the other drags the film down. Indeed, the 1958 half of the story would be a much better film on its own than it is when paired with the halfhearted and flat 1990s storyline as it is presented here. Yet, not even the solid-enough half of the film — and its competent actors doing, again, solid-enough work — can elevate the film enough for it to be more than a disappointment.
5 out of 10
– Review written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.
