Unbreakable
From AwardAnnals
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| Director(s) | M. Night Shyamalan |
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| Distributor | Walt Disney Video |
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| When Unbreakable was released, Bruce Willis confirmed that the film was the first in a proposed trilogy. Viewed in that context, this is a tantalizing and audaciously low-key thriller, with a plot that twists in several intriguing and unexpected directions. Standing alone, however, this somber, deliberately paced film requires patient leaps of faith—not altogether surprising, since this is writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s daring follow-up to The Sixth Sense. While just as assured as that earlier, phenomenal hit, Unbreakable is the work of… | |
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
When Unbreakable was released, Bruce Willis confirmed that the film was the first in a proposed trilogy. Viewed in that context, this is a tantalizing and audaciously low-key thriller, with a plot that twists in several intriguing and unexpected directions. Standing alone, however, this somber, deliberately paced film requires patient leaps of faith—not altogether surprising, since this is writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s daring follow-up to The Sixth Sense. While just as assured as that earlier, phenomenal hit, Unbreakable is the work of a filmmaker whose skill exceeds his maturity, its confident style serving a story that borders on juvenile. However, Shyamalan’s basic premise—that comic books are the primary conduit of modern mythology—is handled with substantial relevance.
Willis plays a Philadelphia security guard whose marriage is on the verge of failing when he becomes the sole, unscathed survivor of a devastating train wreck. When prompted by a mysterious, brittle-boned connoisseur of comic books (Samuel L. Jackson), he realizes that he’s been free of illness and injury his entire life, lending credence to Jackson’s theory that superheroes—and villains—exist in reality, and that Willis himself possesses extraordinary powers. Shyamalan presents these revelations with matter-of-fact gravity, and he draws performances (including those of Robin Wright Penn and Spencer Treat Clark, as Willis’s wife and son) that are uniformly superb. The film’s climactic revelation may strike some as ultimately silly and trivial, but if you’re on Shyamalan’s wavelength, the entire film will assume a greater degree of success and achievement. —Jeff Shannon
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In Unbreakable, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan reunites with Sixth Sense star Bruce Willis, comes up with another story of everyday folk baffled by the supernatural (or at least unknown-to-science) and returns to his home town, presenting Philadelphia as a wintry haunt of the bizarre yet transcendent. This time around, Willis (in earnest, agonised, frankly bald Twelve Monkeys mode) has the paranormal abilities, and a superbly un-typecast Samuel L. Jackson is the investigator who digs into someone else’s strange life to prompt startling revelations about his own. David Dunn (Willis), an ex-jock security guard with a failing marriage (to Robin Wright Penn), is the stunned sole survivor of a train derailment. Approached by Elijah Price (Jackson), a dealer in comic book art who suffers from a rare brittle bone syndrome, Dunn comes to wonder whether Price’s theory that he has superhuman abilities might not hold water. Dunn’s young son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark) encourages him to test his powers and the primal scene of Superman bouncing a bullet off his chest is rewritten as an amazing kitchen confrontation when Joseph pulls the family gun on Dad in a desperate attempt to convince him that he really is unbreakable (surely, “Invulnerable” would have been a more apt title). Half-convinced he is the real-world equivalent of a superhero, Dunn commences a never-ending battle against crime but learns a hard lesson about balancing forces in the universe.
Throughout, the film refers to comic-book imagery—with Dunn’s security guard slicker coming to look like a cape, and Price’s gallery taking on elements of a Batcave-like lair—while the lectures on artwork and symbolism feed back into the plot. The last act offers a terrific suspense-thriller scene, which (like the similar family-saving at the end of The Sixth Sense) is a self-contained sub-plot that slingshots a twist ending that may have been obvious all along. Some viewers might find the stately solemnity with which Shyamalan approaches a subject usually treated with colourful silliness offputting, but Unbreakable wins points for not playing safe and proves that both Willis and Jackson, too often cast in lazy blockbusters, have the acting chops to enter the heart of darkness. —Kim Newman
Barnes and Noble
M. Night Shyamalan’s follow-up to The Sixth Sense is, like its predecessor, an intelligent, eerie thriller that raises as many questions as it does goosebumps. Unbreakable reteams Shyamalan with Bruce Willis, here playing stadium security guard David Dunn-the lone survivor of a catastrophic train wreck-whose lifelong imperviousness to injury and illness intrigues accident-prone comic-book collector Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson). Elijah postulates that David’s seeming invulnerability is the sign of an honest-to-goodness superhero. Shyamalan’s exploration of this concept is conducted in a deadly earnest manner; there’s nothing puerile or campy about it. Willis, whose character is a melancholy soul tormented by the failure of his marriage and the alienation of his son, plays Dunn with subtlety and restraint, and Jackson makes Elijah a pitiable but convincing eccentric whose persuasiveness eventually sways the security guard. Shyamalan sustains a gloomy atmosphere throughout, and a lengthy third-act set piece-in which David tests Elijah’s theory amidst horrifying circumstances-is guaranteed to leave your teeth chattering and your knees knocking. Unbreakable is a tribute to the ingenuity of its talented writer-director, who takes an inherently ridiculous notion and makes it plausible by virtue of his masterful storytelling gifts. Shyamlan provides a commentary for the DVD, as does composer John Newton Howard; additionally, there are three featurettes covering aspects of the film’s production, and storyboard-to-film comparisons.
