★½ (1½ out of 4)
A potent cast, led by “Gladiator” Oscar winner Russell Crowe and Jacob Tremblay, 19, best known for costarring with Oscar winner Brie Larson as a child born in captivity in 2015’s “Room,” goes up in flames in the Netflix drama “Unabomber.” And a bomb it is, lacking in surprise, suspense and any reason for actually existing. Don’t let the starry cast fool you. “Unabomber,” shamelessly faking its way through the facts, is dead on arrival.
“Unabomber” divides itself in half to tell two stories. The first is a dramatized account of Ted Kaczynski, the domestic terrorist persuasively played as a young man by Tremblay. At Harvard in 1958, the brilliant but isolated teenager becomes involved in mind experiments devised by psychology professor Henry Murray (Crowe). What Ted expects to be debates about ideas turns into repeated personal humiliation at the hands of this tyrannical teacher. The film presents that betrayal as a turning point in his growing hostility toward society and technology.
A bomb it is, lacking in surprise, suspense and any reason for actually existing.
A mathematics prodigy, Ted abandoned his academic career in 1969 to pursue a reclusive primitive lifestyle and lone wolf terrorism campaign. Kaczynski murdered three people and injured 23 others between 1978 and 1995 in a nationwide mail bombing campaign against those he believed to be advancing modern technology and the destruction of the natural environment. In 1995, he authored a roughly 35,000-word manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, advocating violent revolution.
The second part of Unabomber” is set decades later as FBI agent Joanne Miller, played by Shailene Woodley, investigates the mail bombings. The film cuts back and forth between how he became the Unabomber and how investigators identified him. Near the end, Ted’s final confrontation with Murray is intercut with the FBI raid on his Montana cabin. Ted’s participation in Murray’s experiments is real, but the film’s detailed relationship between them is speculative. Miller and the other FBI agents are fictionalized characters.
This wouldn’t be much of a problem if “Unabomber” knew how load pulse-pounding tension into its dual stories. It does not. Director Janus Metz Pedersen (“Borg vs. McEnroe”), working from a shockingly tedious script by Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves, doesn’t really devote that much time to make the case that Ted’s problems stem from problems with a bad teacher. Quite the theory, but despite the efforts of Tremblay and Crowe, everything seems disturbingly hard to swallow, notably the wires that the prof attaches Dr. Frankenstein style to the body and brain of his guinea pig student. The experiment isolated Ted from his friend Roy (David Webster) and also Christiana (Annabelle Wallis), the professor’s assistant.
The manhunt itself should be naturally easy to generate nerve-rattling, edge-of-seat tension. But “Unabomber” blows even that opportunity, wrapping a surefire vehicle for physical drama in a blanket of bland. A betrayal of Ted by his own brother David (Matthew Kevin Anderson) also falls flat. And the transition of Ted from fresh clay (Tremblay) to Manson-like maniac (Michael Laurence) feels abrupt and unconvincing. Somewhere in the journey from idea to execution, “Unabomber” lost its connection to anything resembling life.