There’s a decent stretch at the beginning of Unabomber where your gut starts whispering that this thing might not actually suck.
Part of that optimism comes from the 1950s timeline, when your initial reaction of, Hey, this is giving me A Beautiful Mind vibes, hasn’t yet had enough time to become, Oh fuck, they actually just made Russell Crowe shoot the deleted scenes from A Beautiful Mind.
The other half comes from the mid-’90s timeline, where Unabomber briefly pretends it’s going to be an investigative thriller.
And by briefly I mean. . .uh. . .
By roughly the 16-minute mark—yes, I checked—they’ve already figured out Ted Kaczynski is the Unabomber. Ok “figured out” is the wrong word. Obviously, somebody just told them. Sherlock Holmes himself couldn’t have sobered up, found his little hat and solved the case in the roughly eight-and-a-half minutes of actual investigative screen time we’ve been given.
Structurally, as is probably becoming apparent, Unabomber proceeds as a split-narrative taco salad of terrible. By that 17-minute mark, bouncing between timelines already feels less like a storytelling decision and more like somebody realizing they had eight minutes of decent movie and could get sixteen out of it by showing us half at a time.
Not an insane strategy considering the inventory.
And that pretty quickly becomes the movie’s entire operating system. Every time one timeline gets thin enough that you can see daylight through it, Unabomber slams the button and sends us hurtling back to the other one before anybody has enough time to ask what the fuck we’re actually watching.
The ’90s side, having already dragged its big “IT’S TED KACZYNSKI” banner behind a plane circling the FBI field office, eventually decides it’s Zero Dark Thirty from here. So we re-anchor the movie around Shailene Woodley trying to convince her superiors that the extremely specific tip they received about Ted Kaczynski might, in fact, have something to do with Ted Kaczynski.
One of the big investigative breakthroughs involves her—I shit you not—opening an atlas on a desk and apparently discovering that Montana exists.
The movie even gives us a nice shot of the page.
Montana is still there.
Case cracked.
Meanwhile, back in the 50s, roughly half of Crowe’s allotted Beautiful Mind fragments involve him being genuinely kind to young Ted. He's helping him deal with the psychological fallout of Satan’s Debate Club or teaching him to stand up to his tormentor, played by the excellent but hilariously-without-backstory Gus Halper. Building a great character in his scenes for sure. But it doesn't feel like the one the movie needs to come in and beat us over the head with its all-too-predictable point.
Crowe is just nailing the warm, stabilizing father figure the movie has asked him to play.
And so every 40 seconds or so, just as you’re starting to get the wrong idea about the relationship, Unabomber has got to pull you away from it via the ol' switcheroo. And that leaves us with a lot of frantically rearranging of the cast like somebody playing musical chairs on All-Madden mode.
Back to the ’90s.
Back to Crowe.
Back to Shailene.
Quick, somebody get us a copy of the yellow pages.
And that’s what makes the whole thing so maddening. Unabomber looks like a good movie. It has sleek, moody production value. It has actors who know how to execute. Every now and then, it even coughs up a scene that makes you think there might be a genuinely compelling movie buried somewhere beneath all the frantic timeline-hopping.
There just never comes a point where an actual movie falls out the bottom.
I won’t get into the point Unabomber is trying to make because, well, it fucking doesn’t.
Instead, I’ll leave us with the humiliating reality that the cleanest cinematic treatment of Ted Kaczynski remains the approximately 30 seconds Good Will Hunting needed to make a completely different point:
Robin Williams: “In the 1960s there was a young man that graduated from the University of Michigan. Did some brilliant work in mathematics. . . Then he moved to Montana and he blew the competition away.”
Stellan Skarsgård: “Yeah, so who was he?”
Williams: “Ted Kaczynski.”
Skarsgård: “Haven’t heard of him.”
Williams: [Yelling across the bar] “Hey, Timmy!”
Timmy, the everyman-incarnate bartender: “Yo.”
Williams: “Who’s Ted Kaczynski?”
Timmy: “Unabomber.”
90s timeline. No atlas required. Still slaps.
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