Unleashed, directed by Louis Leterrier, is marketed as an action film, but there is more to the plot than the excellent fighting sequences. What unfolds is a new version of George Bernard Shaw's classic Pygmalion (1916). When the film begins, Danny (played by Jet Li) has a collar around his neck. Soon, his gangster "uncle" Bart (played by Bob Hoskins) takes the collar off and orders, "Kill!" Danny then pounds everyone in sight except for his uncle and his gang, who depart with loot; on returning home, he is locked up in a cage. The puzzle of the movie, thus, is how an adult man could have been trained to accept his role as a killer dog. Pieces of the puzzle emerge gradually, though a clue emerges when Danny opens a spelling book in his cage and stops to stare at the page P that has a picture of a piano. During another caper, while awaiting a signal to attack, he encounters a friendly piano tuner, Sam (played by Morgan Freeman), who is blind and thus assumes that Danny is a nice guy; indeed, he is a puppy while the collar is around his neck. One day, Bart and his driver are nearly killed by a rival gang, which rams his car. When Danny climbs out, believing that his master is dead, he wanders the streets of Glasgow and eventually locates Sam, who takes him into his home. A New Yorker, Sam is in town because his eighteen-year-old Kansas-born white stepdaughter Victoria (played by Kerry Condon) is attending piano classes at a music conservatory. Sam and Victoria then gradually train Danny to become a sensitive grown up, and Danny has flashbacks that begin to explain why and how Bart adopted him. When Victoria ends her schooling, she and Sam plan to return to New York, so they invite Danny to come along. That day, however, Danny runs into one of Bart's henchmen, who returns Danny to his cage. However, Danny no longer wants to kill people, and he is beginning to recall the trauma in his infancy when Bart killed his mother and began to train him as a killer dog. More fight scenes ensue, and the desired happy ending will not disappoint filmviewers. MH
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