“A unique situation”: The violent action movie that took Morgan Freeman to Glasgow
According to deeply thought-out scientific research, which we have in no way just made up, the most calming sounds to the human ear are as follows: crackling fires, ocean waves lapping at a shore, leaves being rustled by a gentle wind and any kind of documentary that Morgan Freeman is talking over.
A while ago, more than 20 years ago in fact, it was marching penguins who benefitted from Freeman’s mellifluous tones while they waddled about the place, illustrating how poorly designed some animals can be. And most recently, it’s been the turn of our sadly extinct ornithopod friends, as Freeman has added his deeply sleep-inducing voice to Netflix’s hit documentary The Dinosaurs, which is probably similar to the penguin one, only with less sliding around helplessly on ice and much more flesh-tearing.
So famous is Freeman’s voice, in fact, heard over everything from documentaries about the universe to a film about when The Beatles hung out in India for a bit, that it’s easy to forget that the guy is and has been for some time, an award-winning actor, a five-time Oscar nominee in fact with a win for Clint Eastwood’s boxing movie Million Dollar Baby under his belt.
Of course, his most famous role is probably as Red in the brilliant prison drama The Shawshank Redemption, but elsewhere on his CV, there are superb performances in big movies like Driving Miss Daisy and the apartheid sports drama Invictus with Matt Damon. Not all of his films are quite as well known, however, and 21 years ago, the same year as March of the Penguins, in fact, saw Freeman take on one of his more unusual roles.
It was for the 2005 action movie Unleashed, a film written by Léon director Luc Besson and starring martial arts hero Jet Li, alongside, rather surprisingly, Bob Hoskins. What’s perhaps even more surprising is that Freeman, Hoskins and Li all decamped to the Scottish city of Glasgow, land of the annual Irn-Bru carnival (Europe’s biggest indoor funfair!), where a violent tale of gangland crime bosses and enforcers played out.
As Freeman explained to NPR at the time, “It’s a very human story and a very interesting character to play in a unique situation. I’m a Black man with a white daughter, living in Scotland, because my daughter’s going to the conservatory there in Glasgow, and we meet this young, I think he’s playing Vietnamese in this, and we meet this young, very damaged soul and take him in, and we become family.”
What Freeman neglects to point out is that his character is 1) a piano tuner and 2) blind, which adds even more of an air of ‘how the hell did this get thrown together’ to proceedings. But despite all the randomness at play, Unleashed actually fared quite well on release. While not hugely financially successful, it is now regarded as one of Li’s best foreign movies, if not one of Freeman’s.
Quite confusingly, it was released in some markets under the name Danny the Dog, which is also the title of the soundtrack put together by Massive Attack.
Freeman is now working on a couple of new movies, firstly Hate to See You Go, the story of an ageing Chicago blues musician hitting the road for one last shot at glory, co-starring US comic Bill Burr, and The Little Bedroom a remake of a French 2010 movie about a man in a care home forging a close friendship with a nurse after a heavy fall.
