Unbreakable (2000)

reviewed by
JONATHAN F RICHARDS


OPPOSITES ATTRACT
UNBREAKABLE

Written and Directed by M. Night Shyamalan

With Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson
PG-13 107 min.
2 chiles

Make no mistake about it. As sure as his middle name is Night, M. Night Shyamalan has a taste for the dark side. When he grabbed our attention last year it was with an absorbing story called The Sixth Sense about a little boy who saw dead people, and Bruce Willis turned out to be one of them. This time it's Bruce Willis who sees the dead people. He's David Dunne, the only survivor of a train that jumps the rails at high speed; everyone around him is killed, and he walks away without a scratch.

The train wreck puts him in the news, and he's contacted by an eccentric comic book collector named Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson). Elijah is the opposite of David - his bones snap like fine china. In school he was so brittle the kids called him Mr. Glass, and he got so bitter he wouldn't go outside to play till his mother bribed him with comic books.

Comic books changed Elijah's life and gave him purpose. As an adult he runs a rare comic gallery, selling first editions and original art, and when he hears about David's miraculous survival of the train wreck he becomes convinced that David may be an indestructible man with extraordinary powers. "These are mediocre times", he tells David; the world is primed for an action messiah, a man uniquely equipped to do battle for good and foil the forces of evil. In other words, a superhero.

David's initially skeptical, and who can blame him, but the more he tests Elijah's crazy theory the saner it begins to look. He's never been sick a day in his life. Never been hurt, except one time as a boy when he nearly drowned. Not only that, but he turns out to have "super" powers. He even has his superhero's weakness, his own kryptonite.

He may be unbreakable physically, but he's pretty fragile emotionally, and his domestic life is on the verge of falling apart. His wife Audrey (Robin Wright Penn) sleeps in the guest room, and his son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark) is pathologically attached to his old man, especially when the kid starts buying into Elijah's theory that his dad's a superhero.

Shyamalan writes a fascinating premise and an elegant story, but his weakness comes out in the telling. His characters ask and tell each other things that are justified only as exposition. He's hooked on atmosphere, using blue filters so regularly he might as well be shooting underwater, and he has Willis moving most of the time in what amounts to a virtual catatonic trance. You can understand David's stunned slowness in the aftermath of the train wreck, but it goes on, scene after scene, until you want to reach up through the screen and slap him out of it. As the movie pours on the water imagery, David himself seems to be moving underwater, and while it may feel dramatic as hell from his side of the screen, it soon becomes irritating from ours.

It's a shame, because so many fine elements are there. The story is original, a lot of the imagery is powerful, clues are scattered with the same intriguing cleverness that made The Sixth Sense such a satisfying puzzler. There are scenes of marvelous subtlety, such as one in which Elijah explains to a prospective buyer in his gallery the iconic complexities of a beautiful piece of original superhero comic art. There are some terrific performances, particularly Jackson, with his bent body and large head cocked at a painful angle, eyes set deep in shadowy darkness that reflects the anger and anguish of a tortured soul. Also impressive is Robin Wright Penn as the wife in a marriage that has gone south for no clear reason other than her husband's comatose personality, who seizes on the miracle of his miraculous survival as a chance to fan the fading embers back to life. Willis has the physicality for a comic book hero, with his square jaw and bulging muscles, but the studied lifelessness of his performance robs the character of the dynamism it needs. As he moves away from his action movie phase, he's becoming almost unbearable sensitive, relating wistfully to little boys and simplifying his range of expression down to one. His appealing cocky swagger has died hard, with a vengeance

Unbreakable has a strong core story, but it rambles at the edges. When it gets into the climactic sequence, with Willis plunging into his destiny hooded like Death or the Unabomber as he rights wrongs and defends the weak and distressed, it seriously loses its grip.

Shyamalan, who makes a Hitchcockian appearance as a suspected drug dealer, is fond of surprise endings, and he serves up a doozy here. He uses a lot of upside-down imagery throughout the film - comic book covers shown upside down, television watched upside down, a sign dangling - and he means to turn us upside down as well. It's an ingenious comic book twist, but the movie cries out for an infusion of a little comic book energy as well.


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