director/screenwriter
M. Night
Shyamalan
producers
Barry Mendel
Sam Mercer
M. Night Shyamalan
cinematographer
Eduardo Serra
music
James Newton Howard
editor
Dylan Tichenor
cast
Bruce Willis (David Dunn)
Samuel L. Jackson (Elijah Price)
Robin Wright Penn (Audrey Dunn)
Spencer Treat Clark (Joseph Dunn)
Charlayne Woodard (Elijah's Mother)
Eamonn Walker (Dr. Mathison)
Leslie Stefanson (Kelly)
Johnny Hiram Jamison (Elijah at 13)
M. Night Shyamalan (Drug Dealer)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 106m
u.s.
release: November 22,
2000
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official website
other m.
night shyamalan films
reviewed on this website:
- signs
- the
sixth sense
|
Reviewing
a movie like Unbreakable not only takes extraordinary
skill at waffling (you have to bend over backwards not to reveal
anything), it also requires a case of selective amnesia, because
the movie is two-thirds of a remarkable atmospheric thriller.
But a movie like this lives or dies on the strength of its ending,
and in this case the prognosis doesn't look good. Was the writer-director
M. Night Shyamalan compelled to deliver a whammy on the level
of the twist ending of his big hit The
Sixth Sense? Hard to say, but it's a bit of a non-whammy
-- not a dud, exactly, but a disappointingly conventional capper.
We'll start from the beginning. Bruce Willis must have enjoyed
working for Shyamalan last time, because he returns here as security
cop David Dunn. We meet David on a train from New York to Philadelphia
-- a train that derails and crashes, killing the other 131 passengers
but leaving David unscathed. His mirror image, it seems, is a
brooding loner named Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), who coincidentally
is often seen in reflections. Elijah has osteogenesis imperfecta,
a rare disease (one in every 20,000 Americans is born with it)
that makes the bones brittle and easily broken. Elijah, a devout
comic-book reader, sees David as a parallel figure, an unbreakable
man, perhaps even a superhero; then again, Elijah may also be
just a lonely guy who's read too many comics, and David assumes
the latter to be true -- even though he can't remember the last
time he was sick.
Shooting once again in the overcast, unflashy locations of Philadelphia,
Shyamalan and cinematographer Eduardo Serra work from a palette
of blues and grays; the entire city has five o'clock shadow.
And Shyamalan, as he did in The Sixth Sense, lets the
scenes play out in calm, hushed intimacy. The domestic scenes
involving David and his estranged wife (Robin Wright Penn) and
troubled son (Spencer Treat Clark) are done with exquisite tact
and economy -- you get the sense that Shyamalan really wants
to make dramas with supernatural elements, not supernatural thrillers.
Shyamalan takes us in close, picking up sad and angry whispers;
his people almost never raise their voices. The actors, particularly
Jackson, seem to relish the small, subtle notes Shyamalan encourages
them to play.
Unbreakable takes pains to set up its gloomy world and
then, like The
Exorcist, introduces odd occurrences that are all the
more disturbing because they feel real -- they feel like
the unbelievable-and-yet-it's-really-happening events we've all
experienced. An extended sequence in which David pays a visit
to a dangerous man is a top-notch exercise in suspense and the
glimpsed horrors of violence, even though it leads to a rather
clumsy bit of fighting (then again, the clumsiness may be the
point). The little moments are also terrific, as in a silent
breakfast-table scene when David shows his son a newspaper article
and, from the expressions on their faces, we can take our pick
of several possible emotions.
The movie goes along so well and smoothly, and then takes a rollercoaster
dive into ... well, let's just say this isn't The Sixth Sense,
whose ending flipped the entire story around and gave you that
satisfying click when everything came together in your head.
There's no click here except the writer-director pulling the
trigger of his plot's unloaded gun. Without spoiling anything,
I'll say that I like the concept of the ending -- it does
make sense -- but it's far too abrupt, and the use of "this
is what happened next" titles at the end (usually reserved
for movies based in fact) just makes us wish there were more
movie, more of a wrap-up. Shyamalan, elsewhere so skilled
at "show, don't tell," seems to forget that here. The
film needed more beats, more scenes, a smoother ramp up to the
end revelation. I would rank Unbreakable with Sleepy
Hollow, another hypnotic mood painting that seemed too
eager to get to its chintzy Murder, She Wrote denouement.
These directors should have more faith in their power to enthrall
us; Shyamalan's achievement here is that he creates a mood that
seems all but unbreakable, only to break it. |
