“UNABOMBER” Review: Yet Another Generic True Crime Drama With The Netflix Fingerprint All Over

Ahh, another day, another true crime story hitting Netflix…

Honestly, the most accurate review here might be this. It really is another true crime story on Netflix. Whether that reads as a compliment or a warning depends entirely on how many of these you’ve already sat through. But yeah, we’ve sat through enough to know exactly what we’re getting before the opening titles even finish loading.

So, the latest name in this lineup is the “Unabomber”, a case that’s been sitting in America’s history books for decades and one most people only know by nickname. If you’re not a true crime nut and were wondering, like we were, why “Unabomber”? Did the guy only ever set off one bomb? Nope. The name actually comes from the FBI’s own internal file for the case, UNABOM, short for UNiversity and Airline BOMber, which is exactly where he started, going after university staff and an airline before his target list grew.

That’s the world this film drops you into cold. It opens decades into the story, bombs already going off, the FBI already deep into what becomes the longest and most expensive manhunt in its history, led by agent Joanne Miller (Shailene Woodley). We get a body count before we get a face. Well, here are some numbers, for context. Seventeen years, sixteen bombs, three deaths, twenty-three injuries, and a manifesto so long the New York Times and Washington Post printed the whole thing, partly out of fear, partly because the FBI asked them to.

Then the film winds back the clock, and keeps winding, jumping between that manhunt and a teenage Ted at Harvard. He’s a maths prodigy who skipped ahead of kids twice his size and still hasn’t figured out how to talk to people his own age, let alone people twice his age. Home isn’t much warmer. His dad wants exactly one thing from him, and that is to stay in the numbers. Focus on the math.

However, Ted is invited into a university research group run by Professor Henry Murray (Russell Crowe), the kind of attention a sixteen-year-old Ted has clearly been craving. His dad hates it immediately, picking up on something Ted, young, naive, and with zero radar for manipulation dressed up as mentorship, simply can’t see. Ted thinks he’s finally found people who take his ideas seriously. “The professor chose me because of what I wrote,” he says at one point, practically glowing. That’s not quite the whole story, and the film clearly enjoys letting us know it before Ted does, cutting back to the manhunt just often enough to remind us exactly where all this naivety ends up.

The two timelines keep trading off from there. Harvard gives us the why, watching Murray’s experiments, the same ones later tied to the CIA’s MK Ultra programme, slowly turn an awkward kid into something far more broken. The manhunt gives us the how, or really the lack of it, as Miller chases a suspect she can barely pin down.

The mood around all this is fine. A little flat, but fine. This isn’t really a tense watch, and what tension there is mostly shows up in Crowe’s scenes, with maybe one real exception on Miller’s side near the end. Which is a shame, because the manhunt half is supposed to run on not knowing where Ted will strike next, only how. Except present-day Ted never really feels like a threat, more like a shadow the film keeps promising to catch up with. It’s only back at Harvard, watching a sixteen-year-old work out what’s actually being done to him, that the film finds anything genuinely unsettling.

That gap is also where the “does this glamorise him” question keeps creeping back in, the one that turned into a real controversy before the film even came out. Jonathan Epstein, son of bombing victim Charles Epstein, accused Netflix of glorifying Kaczynski by giving so much time to his psychology instead of his crimes. Does it actually do that though? Not really. There’s a difference between explaining someone and excusing them, and “Unabomber” mostly stays on the right side of that line, even if the marketing doesn’t always make that obvious from the outside.

Jacob Tremblay carries the whole college-era half, and he’s good at it, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s watched him make a career out of playing bright kids who don’t quite fit in. He gets the awkwardness right without ever turning Ted into a cartoon, which is harder than it sounds when you know exactly what this kid grows up to become.

Still, the film only really comes alive when Crowe’s on screen. He plays Murray with just enough charm that the experiments stop feeling like a plot device and start feeling like something a whole institution quietly let happen, and every scene he’s in makes everyone else look like they’re working a little harder to keep up.

He’s not playing some noble professor either, and there’s real resentment and fear simmering under every session. Some of that comes from Annabelle Wallis, playing Murray’s real-life research partner (and rumoured mistress) Christiana Morgan. She’s no passive note-taker. The film treats her as someone who knows exactly what these sessions are doing to their subjects and helps run them anyway, which makes the whole thing feel less like one man’s ego trip and more like the system backing him up.

Woodley, for her part, does what she can with a case that just won’t crack, but her half of the story never gets the same depth the Harvard timeline does. It’s honestly kind of bland, which is a shame, because we know exactly what she’s capable of. We’ve seen her in “To Catch a Killer”. Heck, she just won an Emmy for Hulu’s “Paradise”, a performance that genuinely got us. So the talent’s clearly there. It’s just that the script doesn’t give her much to do with it.

Where the film actually earns something is in what it’s saying about manipulation, not just as a motive, but as something someone builds on purpose. Murray didn’t hand Ted a bomb. He handed him a wound and let it sit there for twenty years. “Unabomber” is at its best when it treats everything that follows as the far end of a chain that started in a Harvard office, with a professor writing down things he had no business writing down. That’s a genuinely solid way to tell this story, showing how manipulation turns people into monsters and just how far the damage can spread once it’s set loose.

Beyond that, though, “Unabomber” doesn’t really stand out. It hits its marks, tells its story fine, and never quite finds a reason to exist beyond “this happened, and Netflix owns the rights.” Which, to be fair, describes half of Netflix’s true crime catalogue already. This one just quietly joins the shelf, carrying a genuinely good idea that a slightly tenser movie could’ve made unforgettable.

“UNABOMBER” is currently streaming on Netflix.