Jacob Tremblay doesn't convince as the teenage Ted Kaczynski in this Netflix filler, which alternates a semi-interesting psychological origin story with a by-the-numbers procedural following his capture.
By Guy Lodge
Plus IconGuy Lodge
Film Critic
@guylodge See All
©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection The Unabomber may be a figure of enduring public fascination, but it’s hard to see that extending to “Unabomber,” Netflix‘s unimaginatively titled and prosaically assembled drama about how domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski was radicalized, and how he was caught. Alternating between a standard-issue procedural thriller, dramatizing the FBI’s final year of investigation on the case, and psychologically revealing flashbacks to the 16-year-old Kaczynski’s freshman year at Harvard, Janus Metz‘s film has some built-in intrigue from its subject matter alone, but rote dialogue and autopilot true-crime styling do little to fire the imagination. Meanwhile, the dual timelines never spur or inform each other in any meaningful way; the sense that two disparate but half-baked Unabomber projects have been unhappily welded together is hard to shake.
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