Russell Crowe Crime Thriller Claims Top Spot on Netflix

Netflix has added another notorious criminal story to its library. The streaming service recently released Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, which is the latest installment in Ryan Murphy’s serial-killer anthology. Now, Netflix has turned its attention to one of America’s most infamous domestic terrorists.

Netflix subscribers have shown a strong interest in that history. The crime drama Unabomber stars Russell Crowe and Jacob Tremblay. It climbed to the top of the Netflix worldwide movie chart just days after its release.

Unabomber arrived on Netflix on Sept. 25. According to FlixPatrol, the feature reached the number-one movie worldwide spot by Sept. 27. It currently sits ahead of Best of the Best, The Whisper Man, A Minecraft Movie, and Black Adam on the global chart.

What is Unabomber about?

Unabomber is a true-crime thriller that mixes a psychological character study with a familiar police procedural. The movie unfolds across two timelines, jumping between Ted Kaczynski’s early years at Harvard and the FBI investigation that eventually brought the Unabomber case to a close.

Jacob Tremblay plays Kaczynski as a teenage Harvard prodigy. The brilliant but increasingly isolated young man becomes the subject of controversial psychological experiments overseen by Harvard professor Henry Murray, played by Russell Crowe. Those experiments become a major part of the movie’s attempt to explore the experiences and ideas that shaped Kaczynski before he became the domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber.

The other half of the story moves decades forward, as the FBI attempts to identify the man behind a string of bombings. Shailene Woodley plays Joanne Miller, an FBI agent who becomes particularly interested in understanding who the Unabomber is and what motivates him. The investigation gives the movie its procedural side, with the FBI following leads while Miller becomes increasingly convinced that understanding Kaczynski’s psychology could help crack the case.

The Harvard material leans into psychological thriller and dark-academia territory, while the FBI storyline plays more like a conventional manhunt procedural. Some critics argue that the movie’s two timelines do not always fit together smoothly, with the procedural sections feeling more familiar than the scenes focused on Kaczynski’s formative years.

Early reviews are poor overall despite the streaming popularity. Unabomber holds a 23% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. Several reviews praise the performances from Tremblay and Crowe while criticizing the screenplay and its familiar true-crime approach.

Source: Polygon