"Unbreakable" Rated PG-13
****/*****
Unbreakable, which again teams writer-director M. Night Shyamalan with star Bruce Willis, is a very original, very exciting drama to start off the holiday season. It is very much like Shyamalan's last box office and critical hit, The Sixth Sense, however it does not have the same, seemingly effortless plot movement is his Sixth Sense did. The directing is absolutely incredible, with each scene having its on unique style. It is almost as if each scene was directed by a different person!
The plot, however, is as far-fetched as his last. Bruce Willis stars as David Dunne, a security guard for a high school who gets in a terrible train crash. He wakes up to discover that he is not only the sole survivor out of more the 100 passengers, but he miraculously does not have a single scratch on him. Enter Samuel L. Jackson. Jackson plays Elijah Price, an avid comic book collector since he was little, and a sufferer of osteogenesis imperfecta, a bone disease that leaves him easily susceptible to numerous painful bone breaks. He realizes that if he breaks all the time, there must be someone else at the other end of the spectrum. He also tries to help Dunne make sense of the startling realization that he may be 'unbreakable' who is seemingly equated to a comic book hero.
It also focuses on Dunne's fizzling relationship with his wife played by Robin Wright Penn, and his growing relationship with his son Jeremy, played brilliantly by young actor Spencer Treat Clark (Gladiator). It seems Shyamalan is a perfect directed to make child actors famous.
The story is not as well developed as Sixth Sense. It is very slow moving towards the end of the film. However, in this one, the ending is sort of pointless. It seems like Shyamalan tried to hard to come up with another good ending and just picked the first thing that came to his mind and tried to make it fit. I won't tell you what the ending is, but I will tell you that Bruce Willis is not dead.
This film explores the very important question "what are you meant for in life?" as well as explaining the truth about comic books. And as young Elijah's mother says at the beginning of the movie, you can bet your ass that "this one has a surprise ending."
