Unabomber is now streaming on Netflix.
Unabomber covers the formative years and later arrest of Ted Kaczynski, the titular mail bomber who terrorized the US from the late 1970s until the mid-1990s. Director Janus Metz’s mixed bag of a film aims to understand the origin of a domestic terrorist but it never quite convinces or connects.
As FBI Agent Joanne Miller, Shailene Woodley — decent in a two-dimensional role almost any actress could have played — leads the surprisingly inert 1990s portions of the film chronicling the manhunt for Kaczynski, then a hermit living in the woods of Montana.
This storyline strives for serial killer movie suspense, but it never musters enough thrills to overcome its inherent tropes. It reduces the FBI’s capture to a dull TV cop procedural instead of capturing the magnitude of what was a historic win for law enforcement.
What sets Unabomber apart from other projects about this notorious criminal are the portions set at Harvard University during the Cold War. This is where teenage Theodore Kaczynski (Jacob Tremblay), a brilliant mathematics student who yearns to be a philosopher, participates in a harrowing psychological experiment overseen by Professor Henry Murray (Russell Crowe).
Murray’s (now clearly unethical) program was meant to stress-test a person’s philosophical arguments, but instead it became an abusive quest to break a person until they changed. (It’s all very Manchurian Candidate.)
The movie suggests that Murray ultimately unleashed a monster within Kaczynski who would later target the industrial and academic institutions he blamed for ruining the natural world and robbing humans of liberty. The reality is more complicated.
As the prodigy-era Kaczynski, Tremblay, try as he might, struggles to convey the psychological layers of his damaged character. Crowe delivers a fine but rote turn as the doctor who manipulated his student.
Murray’s actions certainly make him the heavy of this film, but Crowe plays him with enough haughtiness to prevent the character from being a complete mad scientist cliche. Like Kaczynski, Murray wants the world to know how brilliant he is but he may, in fact, just be a big loser.
If you’re on Netflix looking for something worth your while about this subject the better choice to stream would be the 2020 documentary Unabomber: In His Own Words.
