Jet Li's Best Hollywood Villain Is The One Opponent He Didn't Fight
Jet Li has faced many formidable enemies in his movies, but none top Bob Hoskins's vicious but non-physical Bart in Unleashed. Released in 2005, Unleashed is widely cited as Jet Li's best English-language movie. Li portrays Danny, a young man enslaved by Bart, a ruthless Glasgow loan shark, and conditioned since childhood to ferociously decimate Bart's enemies on command.
Bearing a collar around his neck, Danny is equated by Bart and others to a dog (the movie was released in some countries with the title Danny the Dog). After Bart is seemingly killed in a car crash, Danny is taken in by Sam (Morgan Freeman), a blind American piano tuner who with his stepdaughter, Victoria (Kerry Condon), shows Danny the love he's lacked for most of his life. Bart, of course, is not dead, nor is he willing to let Danny slip away from his control.
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Hoskins's monstrous performance as Bart makes him a very different kind of villain for a martial arts legend like Jet Li. When Unleashed begins, Bart has dehumanized and held Danny captive for most of his life. Although Bart never actually fights Danny, he doesn't need to in order to be a chilling villain who is completely despicable. Bart has completely dominated Danny for years, keeping him caged and under his thumb due to how young Danny was at his kidnapping coupled with Bart's skill at crafting an impressionable mind to follow his orders.
When an underground fight club emcee, impressed with Bart's use of Danny's collar, asks how he put it into practice, the loan shark replies (with a grin from the Super Mario Bros. actor), "As my saint of a mum used to say, 'Get 'em young, and the possibilities are
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