'UNLEASHED' NOT A TOTAL DOG.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

I NEVER THOUGHT I'd see the following words: Co-starring Academy Award winner Morgan Freeman and, as Danny the Dog, Jet Li.

But that indeed is what ``Unleashed'' (aka ``Danny the Dog'' in France) has to offer. As well as Bob Hoskins in his nastiest British criminal role yet. The movie is different, for sure, and it has a couple of martial-arts sequences that truly kick the genre into savagely inventive new territory.

This thing is completely out of its mind, though, and there's just no way of getting around that.

Danny is owned by Hoskins' Bart, a Glasgow loan shark. Trained from childhood to be a human attack dog, Danny accompanies Bart and his gang on their collecting rounds. When deadbeats won't pay up, Bart unlocks Danny's collar, and passive pup person suddenly gets all kung fu Rottweiler on the pikers.

Kept in a cagelike cell, and a barely childlike state, back at Bart's grungy headquarters, Danny has been conditioned since who knows when into thinking his emotionally manipulative ``Uncle'' is the only person who loves him.

Through a series of ghastly coincidences, Danny winds up in the genuinely nurturing home of Freeman's blind American piano tuner, Sam, and his adopted daughter Victoria (Kerry Condon). She's in Scotland for a piano scholarship and is more than eager to teach Danny how music can soothe his beastly nature, along with the facts of puppy love.

Of course, Bart is not about to let his prize mauler get away from him easily. The violence and psychological bullying he employs to bring Danny back into the fold is astonishing.

Even more amazing is how everybody plays this lunacy with a straight face and sometimes give it all the craft they've got. Sam and Victoria often seem like real people, not the idealized figures they really represent. And Hoskins' performance defines bravura; he seethes and explodes with menace, egomania and rage but can turn on the fake sensitivity with the flick of a villainous eye-twinkle.

Never what you'd call an actor, Li certainly gets Danny's confusion and pain across effectively. He also finds some nice, low-key comedy notes as Danny learns such civilized tricks as how to use a spoon.

This overheated mishmash of tone and temperament was conceived and written by Luc Besson (``La Femme Nikita'') and directed by Louis Leterrier (``The Transporter'') but the real savior here is martial-arts choreographer Yuen Wo Ping (``Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,'' ``The Matrix''). There is much that's worthy about ``Unleashed,'' but you wish that somebody in charge would have reined in its dissonant excesses.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

UNLEASHED - Two and one half stars

(R: violence, language, nudity, children in jeopardy)

Starring: Jet Li, Morgan Freeman, Bob Hoskins, Kerry Condon.

Director: Louis Leterrier.

Running time: 1 hr. 43 min.

Playing: Wide release.

In a nutshell: One-of-a-kind nonsense in which a criminal fighter raised like a dog is humanized by a kindly blind piano tuner and his prodigy daughter. Some great violent action - and acting that would be credible if the story weren't so ludicrous.

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Jet Li goes on the attack in ``Unleashed,'' an action flick with an original, if unusual, premise: The hero was raised as a canine.