Watch Movies Online: Danny The Dog/Unleashed

Unleashed, or as it was known in every country besides the United States, Danny the Dog, was one of Jet Li’s last kung fu movies and one of his best made in the English language. The film is all about the concepts of family, personal freedom and dignity, and it really completely invents its own style of martial arts from the ground up. It’s definitely worth a watch the next time you want to watch movies online and see some great chop socky action.

The movie focuses on a young man named Danny. He’s been raised as a dog for his entire life by Uncle Bart, played with incredible sleaze by the one and only Bob Hoskins. What’s interesting here is that, yes, Danny is a slave, but there’s some real love shared between himself and his crime boss, loan shark master, Uncle Bart. It’s not a healthy love, but they do have some love for each other.

The movie revolves around a very clever gimmick: When Uncle Bart removes the dog collar around Danny’s neck, Danny goes nuts, beating the hell out of anyone in the room. Uncle Bart has trained him to respond in this psychological fashion as such to be a beast when uncollared, and a sweetheart when the collar is on. Throughout the course of the film, Danny’s objective is to learn how to think for himself as such that he doesn’t need the collar to behave civilly.

Danny escapes his boss and winds up in the home of a kindly old piano maintenance man played by none other than Morgan Freeman. Freeman and his daughter take it upon themselves to teach Danny what love and family are really all about, far different from the kind of family Danny had with his Uncle Bart.

There’s a lot of familiar territory here, as Danny beats up all the badguys and they all have a happy ending, but there’s a lot of emotional depth and complexity thanks to the fascinating premise. It’s an old story: Dog escapes his cruel master for a loving master, but doing this story with a human in place of the dog helps to create something that feels new and fresh.

The action in this film is really something. Danny doesn’t do kung fu, he attacks like a rabid dog. It’s more fitting to his character, of course, and it’s an incredible thing to see in action. He bites and scratches, he pulls hair, he just goes wild against his opponents, and it creates a very unique and bizarre fighting style that, of course, would probably be quite ineffective in real life, but is one of those styles like Jackie Chan’s take on drunken boxing that has a lot of personality and expresses the character better than the dialog does.

The movie is ultimately an action flick, and Jet Li beats everyone up and they all live happily ever after and so on and so forth, but there’s a surprising amount of emotional depth and complexity here, as well as some surprisingly great action scenes. Still, you could remove the action and still have a fascinating drama on your hands here.

If you haven’t seen it yet, give it a try. It’s one of Jet Li’s best.

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