And here again is Bruce Willis whispering his lines with fierce concentration. Willis is not dead this time–though he ought to be. Miraculously, his character, a security guard named David Dunn, has survived a train wreck that has killed every other passenger. There’s not a scratch on him. This being a thriller by M. Night Shyamalan, we know there must be more than dumb luck involved. But what?
Enter Elijah Price. Elijah (Samuel L. Jackson) is David’s physical opposite. Born with a condition rendering his bones vulnerable to the least impact, he’s as breakable as David seems immune to physical harm. The owner of an art gallery specializing in comic-book art, he has some weird notion that David, like the comic-book heroes who fascinate him, has been put on earth for a special reason.
“Unbreakable” is structured as a riddle that David, along with the audience, must gradually come to solve. As a director, Shyamalan unfolds his story with stately assurance, slowly upping the ante of creepiness like an anesthesiologist toying with his patient. It’s the story itself that proves to be a problem. This time out, Shyamalan the writer lets Shyamalan the director down badly. Once again he’s got a surprise waiting for us at the end (don’t worry: I won’t give anything away), but when the cat is let out of the bag, it’s a pretty scrawny specimen. Instead of making us look back over the tale with new illumination, it only confirms the growing suspicion that “Unbreakable” is much less than the sum of its parts.
The whole middle section of the movie is basically a stalling tactic. David, who has a Haley Joel Osment-aged son (Spencer Treat Clark) and a physical-therapist wife (Robin Wright Penn) who is about to leave him, gradually comes to believe–prodded on by Elijah–that he is no ordinary mortal. The comic-book connoisseur asks him if he’s ever been ill. David has to think about it, looking up his work records to see if he’s taken any sick days. Now, don’t you think if you’d never had a sick day in your life, you’d have noticed? And if you were gifted with psychic powers, would you be oblivious to them until someone else pointed it out? If you had emerged unscathed from a previous accident, are you likely to have forgotten this detail, as David has? Why is our hero so dense? Because if he weren’t, Shyamalan couldn’t stretch “Unbreakable” to feature length.
What lifted “The Sixth Sense” out of the realm of ordinary horror films was its emotional veracity. We became deeply invested in the characters. Even without the twist ending, it worked–a unique synthesis of thriller and tearjerker. “Unbreakable” has stunning sequences, but there’s nothing real holding the pieces together. Who are these people? Willis and Penn don’t look or act like any working-class Philadelphia couple you’re ever likely to meet. Time after time, Shyamalan sacrifices sense for sensation: there’s a highly dramatic scene in which someone points a loaded gun at David, but there’s no reason to believe that character would hold that gun at that moment. It’s just there for effect. The most exciting section in the film–a bravura action sequence, late in the movie, in which David goes after a killer–is almost totally extraneous to the plot. Dramatically, Shyamalan can’t find the forest for the trees.
“Unbreakable” looks impressive, and if you’re willing to be seduced by its moody surface, you might be satisfied. But it doesn’t bear up under the least bit of scrutiny: it’s much ado about nothing, and the abrupt final revelation only makes matters worse. Someone actually thought this screenplay was worth a record $5 million? To the Hollywood moneymen, anyone whose last movie made more than $200 million is a genius. Still, “Unbreakable” is clearly the work of a gifted filmmaker. But Shyamalan badly needs to explore new territory. He’s done himself no favor making a genre movie everyone will compare with “The Sixth Sense.” It falls way short–and feels way long.
