Unabomber (now on Netflix) is a BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie that we all wish was a BOAFS (Based On A False Story) movie. You’re likely aware that Ted Kaczynski, informally dubbed the Unabomber, chilled Americans to the bone between 1978 and 1995 by mailing out explosive packages that killed three and injured 23 more. This Janus Metz-directed film draws a connection between the young Harvard student who was the subject of experiments by ethically dubious psychological researcher Henry Murray, and the terrorist Kaczynski became. And while the real Kaczynski denied that connection, that doesn’t stop the movie from exploring it via speculative drama.  

UNABOMBER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: FBI Agent Joanne Miller (Shailene Woodley) hasn’t reached maddening Zodiac levels of frustration yet, but she seems close. She and her task force just ran down the wrong guy in San Francisco, which puts her back in the office, trying to convince her peers and superiors that the linguistics in the Unabomber’s recently published manifesto offer the best clue as to his identity. They’re skeptical, and of course they’re all male. It’s 1995. The Unabomber just blew up an ad exec in New Jersey as he enjoyed a happy day at home with his family. Pressure’s on.

Cut to: Harvard, 1958. Kaczynski (Jacob Tremblay) is a greeeeeeeeeeeen 16-year-old socially awkward freshman who yearns to be a philosopher. He’s taken under the wing of Prof. Murray (Russell Crowe) and his assistant Christiana Morgan (Annabelle Wallis), who puff the kid up a little and recruit him for a psychological experiment under the guise of debate-team training. It involves strapping monitors on Kaczynski and sitting him across from a jerk who berates him and calls him the r-word and such until he turns to Jell-o. It’s rough, even for the 1950s, and the ol’ prof apparently isn’t subject to any ethical oversight.

The movie hops between timelines: Kaczynski trains himself to duel with the jerk, fumbles through an awkward double date, and argues with his domineering father. Agent Miller is nudged away from the case but works off the clock, drawing connections between the manifesto and other writings, and interviewing Kaczynski’s younger brother. And we get to dueling conclusions, one that feels realistic, and one that sure seems to benefit from hindsight.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Sharlto Copley plays Kaczynski in 2021’s Ted K., a better, if more disturbing, dramatic study that sticks wholly to Kaczynski’s perspective.

Performance Worth Watching: This klutzoid script does no one any favors. But Tremblay is solid, committed to a character who transitions from shy and naive to the beginning stages of a deeply troubled isolationist.

Our Take: Unabomber seems to have established a goal and aimed to bullseye it, rather than exploring the complicated gray areas of the scenario. It rather desperately wants to assert that evil is made, not born, despite the more uncomfortable truth about the human condition: There’s never a satisfactory why when it comes to people committing despicable acts. 

And so the psychological components of this story are naught but thin thematic gruel rendered either dull and obvious or dull and vague. Metz — who helmed incredibly gripping episodes of Andor but lacks the backstop of excellent material here — oversees a film that feels impatient to reach its foregone conclusions. For a movie that concludes with a title card saying this was the longest manhunt in U.S. history, that piece of the story is shrunk down to a hastily assembled 40-ish minutes of screen time.

While Crowe enjoys a few scenery-chewing moments, Woodley has little to do beyond executing a photocopy of a photocopy of the Clarice Starling-gets-no-respect-because-she’s-a-woman arc from The Silence of the Lambs; like most thematic threads in the film, it’s introduced then left to dangle inconsequentially. The overall story demands a more detailed telling – hate to say it, but maybe it should’ve been a limited series. 

Our Call: Unabomber feels less like a movie and more like another box checked on Netflix’s long, long list of true crime content. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.