It's the feel-indestructible movie of the year
Wow! Neat!
Such were my thoughts after this one was over, and I guess there are a lot of less enjoyable reactions a lesser film could have inspired. Cruising on quickly from the unexpected mega-success of The Sixth Sense, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan decided not to screw around with a combination of elements which paid off for him before. One short year later, Bruce Willis is back, there's a young boy, a surprise ending, same kind of tone, same plodding-but-engaging pace...you might think that he's repeating himself, but Unbreakable proves to be different enough from the film that made Shyamalan the hot new director on the block.
Shyamalan is evidently a fan of comic books, particularly those of the superhero variety. I never really got into them; the brief period in which I did collect comic books involved movie spinoffs instead of superheroes, and the reason I stopped collecting them is amply explained by the opening words of the film which demonstrate just how much time and money the average comic book collector blows on his hobby. Hey, everybody's gotta have a hobby, and I blow at least as much money and time on mine. I just figured out, about a decade ago, that comic books were never going to hold my interest enough to justify the expense. As such, I'm not the best person from whom to get any insights into superhero comic books. Superhero comic-book movies, however, I've seen a few of.
The one stumbling block that superhero movies inevitably run into can be summed up in one word: cheese. What you can reasonably accept, drawn on a page with exaggerated physiques and stylized, uh, everything, will most of the time look pretty absurd on the big screen. What makes sense in a comic book usually comes across as cheesy though the camera eye. Now, in and of itself, this doesn't have to be a bad thing. The first two Superman movies were cheesy, and not ashamed of it. Christopher Reeve wasn't afraid to totally goof it up as Clark Kent, Margot Kidder took Lois Lane's inherent obnoxiousness to new heights, and Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor, how can you go wrong with that? These movies asked to be taken seriously on the cheesy level on which they presented themselves, and earned the privilege. The next two Superman movies were just TOO cheesy - there is definitely such a thing as too much cheese. But this kind of movie shouldn't try to apologize for what cheese it can't get rid of. Such was one of the many, many problems I had with Batman, which took itself so seriously, bent so far backward trying to NOT appear cheesy and trying to apologize for what cheese it had, that it just jacked the cheese up to a whole new level. There's certainly room in the world for a superhero movie that takes itself that seriously, but the timidity revealed by such self-apology does not help such a movie earn MY willingness to take it seriously.
Unbreakable is a superhero movie with the cheese shunted to the side but not expelled; distracted from, but not apologized for. In terms of storytelling, it's along the lines of the "origin story" of any given superhero, and indeed, there's really only enough plot here to fill issue #1 of any given comic book series. But in terms of filmmaking, seems very much aware of the dramatic limitations of sticking too obviously close to the form. It's no accident that the massive promotional machine behind this movie keeps the comic-book stuff to a minimum; the audience this movie is most likely to impress is not the same audience that made X-Men the "love it to death or you suck" hit of last year. Quite the opposite; many people in that first audience would only have been scared off by too much attention drawn to the comic-book aspect, which would've been their loss, but part of me can't help but think they could hardly be blamed.
Hmm, guess I'd better actually get into the movie itself. Like I said, Bruce Willis is back, playing David Dunn, the sole survivor of a devastating train wreck, in fact emerging unscathed from the wreck. This fact does not go unnoticed by one Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), a comic-book enthusiast and comic art gallery owner with a bone disorder which makes for easy fractures. Elijah has been searching for somebody on the opposite end of the health-care spectrum as himself, and asks David (via a note on his windshield) if indeed he's ever even been sick. He hasn't. Is David some kind of indestructible man? If so, what are the ramifications of this for him, his troubled marriage, his adoring son? And what's it going to take to discover just where the limit of his hardiness is? David finds out more about himself as things go on, some things more easily accepted as having gone unnoticed for his entire life than others. I'll try not to spoil any further surprises for you, but suffice it to say that he finds that with great power comes great responsibility.
Sort of like what Scream did with (if not for) slasher movies, Unbreakable has a lot of fun with the "rules" of comic books and superheroes. Notions about super-strengths and super-weaknesses and super-villains and such are tossed around and exploited with a more warm sense of affection than we saw in the spoofery of Scream. Scream was not without reverence for the films that deserved it, but for the most part it was based, not always unreasonably, on the idea that it was better than the slasher films it made reference to. Unbreakable has nothing BUT reverence for the material that inspired it (though the product placement of Marvel titles, while DC titles are slightly altered to avoid giving anybody free advertising, is more than a little suspicious).
And yet, in terms of filmmaking, the comic-book origins of the story are kept relatively discreet. Many shots are framed through doorways and the like to give shots a different shape, as you'd find in the frames on the page of a comic book, for example. But there's no shots of, say, David crashing into a villain's lair through the skylight while evil minions rush to their imminent defeat. Action like this is kept very much down-to-earth. A battle between him and a dastardly thug late in the film is a lumbering, clumsy fight, no last-minute bursts of strength, no one-liners, just a crashing grappling contest that ends, inevitably, in exhaustion. It relies not on the fight itself for its excitement, but on the understanding of the circumstances behind the fight. Extra points for the awesome sequence where David realizes just where he's landed after he's tossed out a window.
The cast is all excellent, though I think Robin Wright as David's semi-estranged wife (separate bedrooms) wasn't all that necessary; maybe this movie just caught me at a point when I started wondering if there were ANY functional marriages in the movies. Jackson in particular manages to transcend the typical (though always fun) performance we expect from him to create a character with an undercurrent of bitterness and vague misanthropy which gives the impression of him being somebody we could never actually like being around in real life, and yet, he's always likeable, and not merely for the fact that it's the always-likeable Samuel L. Jackson (though that of course can't hurt). Spencer Treat Clark as the kid gets something of a thankless task, as his performance will inevitably be compared to that of Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense. Clark doesn't get nearly as much to do, but he does a great job with what he has. For example, it's hard to argue with his childlike logic in one scene which involves David's supposedly well-hidden gun.
Willis plays his role much like he played his character in The Sixth Sense; quiet, a little sad, and seeming like he's long since become accustomed to holding a lot of inner turmoil inside. What haunts him in both films are things that haunt most of us. Last time, it was an inability to let go of the past. This time, we soon find, it's a lack of purpose (well, if it doesn't haunt most of us, it probably should). A sense of needing to play a larger role in things than he's been playing. We also find that he's not the only character who is haunted by that. How these inner conflicts are resolved probably isn't what most of us are thinking about when we think of how to overcome this, but it's definitely interesting and makes for great food for thought.
As you might have heard, there's a twist ending to this one too. You might also have heard less of a consensus as to its effectiveness as you'd heard about that of The Sixth Sense. The twist itself, I liked. Hell, I loved it. It's the only kind of twist ending that really works, the kind that makes you feel like a damn fool for not having seen it coming. After that, things just finish too abruptly, and it's easy to understand why people weren't impressed by that. I wasn't too pleased to see the action just freeze and read a few words on what became of the characters involved in the final scene either. Such a jarringly graceless conclusion seems so at odds with the deliberate, gradual tone of the rest of the film, I can't help but think that there was some degree of post-production tampering, possibly the ol' test audience syndrome.
Much less the crowd pleaser than The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable should nevertheless be seen if only for the viewer to find which side of the schism on which he falls. I have to admit that most people I know who saw it didn't like it, and have been warning me away from it for months. I'm glad I didn't listen, and I feel a little silly that I waited until it got to the cheap theaters.
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