Netflix really seems to have a thing for notorious criminals. In September, the streamer brought viewers Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the latest installment in Ryan Murphy’s serial-killer anthology, while now it has turned its attention to one of America’s most infamous domestic terrorists. And apparently, Netflix subscribers are very interested in that particular corner of history, making Russell Crowe's new streaming thriller one of the biggest streaming movies this fall.
Its latest crime drama, Unabomber, starring Russell Crowe and Jacob Tremblay, has shot to the top of Netflix’s worldwide movie chart just days after its release. Unabomber arrived on Netflix on Sept. 25, and according to FlixPatrol, it was already the number-one movie worldwide by Sept. 27. During the weekend of Oct. 9, the movie still ranks in Netflix's top 10 worldwide.
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, where 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 have argued that the movie's two timelines don't always fit together smoothly, with the procedural sections feeling more familiar than the scenes focused on Kaczynski's formative years.
The early reviews have been pretty dismal overall, despite the movie's popularity on streaming. Unabomber currently has a 23% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes, with several reviews praising Tremblay and Crowe's performances while criticizing the screenplay and its familiar true-crime approach.
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