Action-clad adventures in The A-Team followed up a decade later by portraying domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski in a biopic of the man’s life should show a range for Sharlto Copley. It does not. The man has picked a collective number of shoddy projects to leap onto and has paid the price for it and the lack of quality. A knock-off Oldboy remake, a solid turn in Free Fire and a horrific piece of work in the Netflix-original The Last Days of American Crime. It would appear, more than anything, that Ted K is the most high-profile piece of work Copley has carried out in some time. Aside from Seal Team, obviously. But there are keen pieces of evidence to suggest the man is not a particularly great draw or on-screen presence, as director Tony Stone easily highlights here.
Rejecting the world around him, Kaczynski’s lead-up to life on the fringes and away from modern American culture is showcased in a quick bit of scrolling text. It is, to Stone’s credit, the most articulate way of even attempting to understand Kaczynski’s choices. With a tonal indifference striking through those cold mountains and the synth-heavy Blanck Mass soundtrack, Ted K misses a large scope of its points. Ted K, as it turns out, is a clear look at how isolationism and the maintenance of a solo, permanent trip in the wilderness, will drive people absolutely mental. Idyllic lives are showcased just fine but nobody pursuing it stops to think about the mental impact of diverting attention, immediately, away from the wider world. It was easier then than it is now, but Ted K still misses a fundamental point in the making.
Copley is unconvincing, his narration that appears alongside those silent moments of attempted contemplation falls on deaf ears and does little to draw out the directing charms of Stone, who hopes nature will cover the many cracks of his style. Environmentalism, rejection of the outer world and what pushes a man to live against the blunt end of the real world is a convincing notion unconvincingly shown. Copley’s depiction of Kaczynski, which looks more and more like Bradley Cooper gone feral, is not at all interesting and it is the real downfall of Ted K to fundamentally waste this. Its focus shifts rapidly and without much thought for what it hopes to indicate toward or achieve beyond vague notions of environmental protection.
As noble a goal as that is, attempting to disclose those messages by using The Unabomber as a pariah for the green, green grass, is not a strong move. There are contradictory messages throughout Ted K that make it not difficult to understand the inside war waging on in the mind of someone discontent with society, but certainly enough of a narrative problem to make it redundant. It does not take too long for Ted K to mystify the man that carried out a seventeen-year mail bombing campaign. Not very naturalist of a man to wire up bombs, although Ted K, which takes extracts of a mental case’s manifesto, tries to seek some truth, some beauty, in living in the untouched outdoors. All roads lead to chaos, Ted K states, but Stone’s attempts to convince of the beauty around an isolated individual are unconvincing at best.
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