Unbreakable (2000)
Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

Having not seen The Sixth Sense, I feel particularly well equipped to not make half-baked comparisons to it nor lamely conceived exaltations of it in reviewing Shyamalan's followup, Unbreakable. The last thing anyone needs to hear is some jackass going on and on about how great the motherfucking Sixth Sense was, and how Unbreakable is another haunting and elegiac masterpiece, or what shit have you. Instead, it is far better to have some jackass go on and on making ill-informed and clueless critical remarks with loads of swear words.

So, just taking this film on its own merits, it's worth a see. It looks like how I think of mid-70s Germany: a bit cold and suspicious, but forward thinking and faultless in taste. Befitting a modern cinematic mystery with roots in classic Hitchcock and comic books.

The story is potentially great. It presents the idea that comic book superheroes and supervillains are exaggerated/mythologized ideals based on rare anomalous humans who have unique characteristics (i.e. special powers) and are attuned to the struggle between good and evil. Okay, that's intriguing. Unfortunately the movie falters a bit in trying to execute this ambitious concept.

Bruce Willis is good, actually understated and notably smirk-free, as a guy in his thirties who is slowly beginning to realize that he is a superhero. This isn't said outright, but neither is it kept ambiguous or rendered with anything like subtlety. Every bit of the character's interior journey is telegraphed to the audience in big flashing block letters. That said, it's still a far cry from the limp cartoonery of Superman or Batman. It comes closer than any film I have seen to doing what the truly great comic books do: it engages the beholder in a genuinely gripping human drama that happens to involve ideas you would not generally accept logically. It lets you see the superhero thing from a very human perspective, like few comics or films ever have (Marvels by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross is a good example for the curious). The film plays like a good "origins" issue, where you find out how your favorite superhero got to be who they are. And remarkably, it pulls it off in a pretty non-cheesy way.

It's a downcast movie, which suits the material well. To his credit, Shyamalan resists huge visceral gestures (i.e. the train derailment that spearheads the story is not actually shown, and as such is quite a lot more powerful, because instead we see families of the victims silently waiting in a hospital lobby). His knack for characterization needs serious work, because his strengths as a visual artist do not translate at all to dialogue and exposition. For example, here's Clichéd Exposition Technique #3: Make sure your protagonist keeps a scrapbook of newspaper clippings that document his life in quickly ascertained headlines. At some point, be sure to have protagonist or other interested character look through this scrapbook so the audience can get necessary background info in a few short moments. Shyamalan actually uses this trick twice (for two different characters), and it's equally lame both times. I mean, think about how unrealistic that is. if I kept a scrapbook of all the times I was in the newspaper and you were to look through it, here is what you would learn about my life:

•"Baby couldn't wait: So dad helps mom deliver at home."

•"3rd grade class learns about snakes."

•"Local junior high to present 'Guys & Dolls.'"

•"Summer heat getting to local sanitation workers."

•"Fast food employee finds fun in making humorous signs."

•"Local man arrested for defecating on public property."

•"Letter to the editor: Do not shame public defecators!" And so on. Hardly enlightening, and you find out nothing about so many important facets of my life, such as my love of opera and my low tolerance for whites.

Another characterization cliché exploited here is the Flashback Sequence, also employed twice. The Bruce Willis flashback is more or less fine, but the Samuel Jackson one is plain ridiculous. "They call me Mr. Glass … 'cuz my bones is … made … of … glass." This is not the way to tell us about a character's motivation, in fact it's damn near silly.

Then there's the Robin Wright dilemma. First of all, she is not famous, and secondly, she is not apparently an actor. Much like when my roommate puts on a Todd Rundgren CD and I do not even hear anything coming out of the speakers, when Robin Wright is onscreen, I start to experience huge gaps in dialogue and screen space. I used to think it was because I was having an ocular migraine, but then I realized that this phenomenon only happened when Robin Wright was onscreen. As a result, I have no recollection of large portions of Forrest Gump, and … wait, who were we talking about again? It's that woman who looks like she's slowly turning into Dianne Wiest, what was her name?

Ah, fuck it. Samuel Jackson is good in an extremely odd role that teeters on the verge of laughability. The child actor who played Willis's son garnered praise from that cocksucker PUP (a fellow Loud Bassoon writer), but I thought the kid was quite bad in a role that was annoying to begin with. The climax of the film is effective but a bit contrived, and the denouement is interesting but over the top. All the apples tumble out of the cart at the very end, when Shyamalan actually freezes the shot and inserts a postscript blurb about what supposedly happened to these characters after these events were over. At that point I was like, "What the fuck man! That's only acceptable in a Porky's or Can't Hardly Wait type movie, not a supposedly serious film." I mean, what if at the end of Rocky, there was a paragraph that said "Rocky Balboa went on to fight more high-profile bouts in a long and illustrious career. He still lives in Philadelphia with Adrianne and Butkus." Yuck. It may have been a joke, and if so, it's hilarious, but it's of decidedly questionable intent either way.

I seem to be more down on this flick than up. Not quite so, in fact I found it really enjoyable and loved what it had to say about the mythology of comic books. It tried to do a lot, and the fact that it didn't accomplish everything with real élan is not a huge strike against it. It's visually phenomenal and overall well worth the time spent. I'd like to think that it will result in people taking comics more seriously, but that thought was dashed immediately after the film when three guys beat the living shit out of me after overhearing me saying there should be a movie about Hal Jordan, the greatest Green Lantern of all.

Review by Aames Adams