Review: Unbreakable

Bruce Willis is the sole survivor of a horrific train crash, and even more miraculously, he doesn’t even have a scratch on him. Comic book art dealer Samuel L. Jackson gets in touch with him, and asks if he remembers ever being injured or sick in his entire life. Willis responds that he doesn’t recall any such thing, and Jackson thinks he has an amazing theory as to why. Jackson, by the way, is almost the exact opposite of Willis- he’s physically extremely fragile, easily prone to bones breaking (he came out of the womb with both arms and both legs broken!). Robin Wright plays Willis’ estranged wife, Spencer Treat Clark is their son, and Eamonn Walker appears early as a perplexed doctor witnessing the birth of a very unusual child.

 

“The Sixth Sense” wasn’t the debut from writer-director M. Night Shyamalan (whose later “Signs” is also quite underrated), but it’s the first film of his that anyone had heard of, let alone seen. So, in a sense this 2000 flick was his sophomore effort, and typical of ‘second albums’, this one didn’t go over quite as well. I was pretty mild on it at the time myself. Looking at it again now, I probably took to it a little better, but the same basic problem remains the same: Shyamalan has an interesting idea here, but doesn’t tell it in the best fashion possible. I understand his desire to slowly have Bruce Willis’ character uncover his true nature, and for the film to not want to spell out just what kind of film it is right away. I get that. However, it takes 77 minutes for the film to really get going, and whether I understood why or not, it’s still hard not to get rather impatient. It’s not just the ending that I really liked here, as I said, it starts to go somewhere quite a bit earlier than that. However, I think it really ought to have started at its ending, because it’s the most interesting thing about the film. What comes before the 77 minute mark simply isn’t worthy of anything after it. This is less an issue of screenplay or even structure, though.

 

The main problem is Shyamalan’s air of pretentiousness, his typically mopey tone, and the agonisingly slow pace. This is the kind of film that pisses me off more than a bad film, because Shyamalan’s really got something here on a conceptual level, I’m just not sure he’s the right director for it. His ponderous, low-key trademark tone as a filmmaker just isn’t beneficial here at all. It sucks all the fun out of what eventually reveals itself to be a fun concept (Though the idea at work here, or the ‘Shyamalan twist’ if you will, aren’t hard to spot in advance. We know the deal with Bruce Willis 20-30 minutes in, and I think one unfortunate line of dialogue reveals the final twist around the same time. Hell, the opening title cards are practically big red sirens themselves). If there’s one story that needed to be told in a drawn-out, hushed manner, it’s not this one, though it might just be the originator for a bunch of similarly pretentious, high-minded films in this particular genre (I’m being as spoiler-free as I possibly can, much more so than Shyamalan is himself, really). I wanted to enjoy this film, and the way it’s presented it feels like Shyamalan didn’t want anyone to enjoy the film.

 

I did, however, dig Samuel L. Jackson’s performance, whilst Robin Wright is fine also. As for Bruce Willis, he’s been worse, but has been encouraged to adopt the Shyamalan ‘low key to the point of coma’ approach to acting that worked better in “The Sixth Sense”. Everything worked better in “The Sixth Sense”. There are moments where the film gets to where it might approach greatness…but almost isn’t the same as getting there. Meanwhile, the director’s egotistical insistence on casting himself in important small roles reaches its nadir here. His performance is distractingly awful, to the point where you’re not even sure what he was going for, not helped by credited himself in the role of ‘Stadium Drug Dealer’, even though I don’t think that’s quite accurate (but because of Shyamalan’s performance, I can’t even be certain). As for the end title cards, if the writer-director was aiming for something in the vicinity of faux-documentary or docudrama, he hasn’t set that up well enough at all.

 

I almost hate this film more than Shyamalan’s worst films like “The Village”, because he’s stumbled on a pretty great concept, that with a filmmaker possessing a greater sense of energy and fun, might’ve resulted in a really good film. Get rid of the spoiler-y moments in the film, speed things up a tad and lighten the fuck up, then you’ve got yourself a film worth watching. As is, you’ve got a most frustrating film that nearly works in spite of its filmmaker’s portentous approach. But nearly isn’t good enough, though it’s apparently a favourite film of Quentin Tarantino’s, so there’s that.

 

Rating: C+