Ray Pride

"Unleashed" is one of those unlikely hybrids of action, sound, music and sentimentality that announce you've arrived on Luc Besson Planet.

Made by his EuropaCorp., "Unleashed" (known as "Danny the Dog" in Europe), was written and produced by Besson, but directed by 31-year-old NYU grad Louis Letterier, a Frenchman who directed the earlier Besson-ogram, "The Transporter." The Glasgow-set "Unleashed" opens with a rush of violence, introducing Danny (Jet Li), a feral man who's been kept in captivity since childhood by gangland collector Bob Hoskins. Implausible yet colorful, the story takes a kindly turn when Danny is befriended by a blind piano tuner (Morgan Freeman) and his 17-year-old stepdaughter (Kerry Condon), who introduce him to placid domestic life before Hoskins yanks Danny's collar back into the breaking of bones. A gonzo creampuff, a silly hoot, "Unleashed" is second-rank Besson but first-rate crazy, like an imperfectly translated European graphic novel.

Letterier had been an assistant director to Luc Besson-- "I was the worst AD in the world! I am a nice guy, and you don't want that in an AD"--who entrusted him on the oddball "The Transporter" (2002). While that movie's star, Jason Statham, is trained in martial arts, (and is doing a sequel), Li's greater experience offered a major advantage. "It's so much more interesting because we could do twelve to fifteen moves in a shot," Leterrier says. "If you watch `XXX,' Vin Diesel just gives a punch, cut, reverse, use a stuntman, he does two other punches, that's it. With Jet, we can use different camera moves and you can tell the story through the fighting. You don't have to rely on cutting-cutting-cutting-cutting. We could use cranes to shoot fight choreography, which is very different. Normally, you never use a crane, you're never able to do complicated [camera] moves when you shoot fight scenes."

The idea for the daffy concoction came from Li visiting Besson, hoping to make a cross-cultural follow-up to "Kiss of the Dragon" (2001). Jet wants to move into more conventional cinema," Leterrier says. "His fighting skills are slowly fading away. But Jet had so much fun on `Hero," he came in and asked Luc for a film where he could play a simple man that was raised in violence who, through love, would turn into a regular, normal human being, much like Luc's `Leon: The Professional.' Leon was very simple, raised in violence but an innocent."

Letterier was a bit of an innocent, too. "I was 29 when I directed this film. So with Jet Li, Morgan Freeman and Bob Hoskins in front of your eyepiece, you have to pretend to be a real director! I quickly realized that the way to direct them is not to direct them. You don't make them act; you make them react off each other. You don't direct Morgan Freeman. You just let him do what he does. Bob Hoskins you can direct to give you small, everything in between up to large." Of Hoskin's fulminating gangster blowhard in "Unleashed," Letterier says, "You can get `Roger Rabbit' Bob Hoskins or `Long Good Friday' Bob Hoskins. I wanted it in between the two of them."

"I don't like the American title," he says with a grin and a shrug. " `Danny the Dog,' yeah; `Unleashed'?" He laughs, gesturing that anything could bear that title. "I saw the `Star Wars' trailer: `Star Wars Unleashed'!" He thought the original title better suited the original concept. "I wanted to make a David Fincher kind of movie with lots of effects, `Super Dog!' And then we lost 30 percent of the money halfway through the film. We were supposed to be doing it with another studio, but they said, `Bye-bye! It's too hard for us. We wouldn't know how to market it.' The problem for [most] American studios is that they couldn't put it in a box. You either have to be an action film or a drama or something, but this one has everything. The original studio saw the dailies and they ran away. We all gave back our salaries, but we couldn't [afford] the visual effects. But I started working with the actors and therefore simplified my camera direction to let them act."

He also says he didn't want to do a "rap-fu movie," and a moody score by Massive Attack, with eighty-five minutes of new music, adds immeasurably to the end product. Leterrier wanted them from the start, but instead approached the Chemical Brothers, Fat Boy Slim and Aphex Twin, asking them for "something organic, something moody, something trip-hop-ish," meaning: "Can you do Massive Attack?" "They're my favorite band," Leterrier explains. "I didn't know them personally before. Their last album, `100th Window,' came out while I was shooting, so it was the soundtrack of my shooting experience. I came back to Paris, edited the film. Their music is so cinematic, I thought the entire world had asked them to do soundtracks for their films!"

Leterrier has one last risk he fears. "When the action audience sits down in the theater, in the middle section, they might get extremely bored. And for the people who come to see Morgan Freeman being nice, the first part, with all the violent fights, they might get freaked out. I wanted extreme violence, not torture violence, but real violence, like streetfight violence, to shake up the audience and get them to react, to realize that being at a table, with nice food, a nice man, a nice girl, eating soup, that's normal and that's nice. People who have that should appreciate that."

"Unleashed" opens Friday.

(2005-05-10)

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