'Unbreakable,' not unblemished

By STEVE PERSALL

© St. Petersburg Times, published November 22, 2000

Lightning doesn't strike twice for writer-director M. Night Shyamalan in his encore to The Sixth Sense.

Fewer moviegoers will be captivated by M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable than his 1999 smash, The Sixth Sense, for one reason:

More people believe in ghosts than in comic books.

This movie is not The Seventh Sense, no matter how cadaver-blue those preview trailers appear. Bruce Willis is back, looking pensive as before, confused by surviving a train derailment. You get the feeling his character might really be dead again. Something else otherworldly that can be rationalized in real life is going on, right?

Wrong. If you don't reside in the world of comics, treating every superhero's saga as scripture, there isn't an identifying bond to shiver about. A bit of psychic mumbo-jumbo creeps in way past time for some idea to materialize, but nobody sees dead people. At least not in a sixth sense.

Nobody expects or wants an obviously talented filmmaker like Shyamalan to make the same movie twice. But Unbreakable seems like the kind of script that gathers dust until a filmmaker creates a hit. He gets a pet project made and the studio has a presold commodity for fans of The Sixth Sense, who don't realize until it's too late that lightning hasn't struck twice.

The Sixth Sense impressed because it was foolproof, as if Shyamalan started with his out-of-left-field conclusion and worked backward, covering any tell-tale tracks along the way. Unbreakable also has a late plot twist supposedly wrapping up everything, but nothing has preceded to make it logical, even under the loose standards of movie fantasy.

The film begins with information provided by those misleading previews. David Dunn (Willis) is a passenger on a train, passing time flirting, when an off-screen crash kills everyone aboard except him. Dunn emerges unscathed and returns to his crumbling family (Robin Wright Penn, Spencer Treat Clark). He finds a cryptic note leading to a meeting with Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), a dealer in comic book art whose fragile health has been announced in flashbacks.

Elijah tells David that he is a chosen one, a comics sort of guy with a superpower he doesn't understand yet. Indestructibility is just part of the package. Discovering that gift, and whatever his kryptonite will be, is the crux of Unbreakable. Willis' Dunn, applying his strength in a late rush of confused events, springs from nowhere and means little.

Shyamalan has a nice way of using stillness to create tension, often keeping his actors in place while the view glides between them, making us a voyeur to something that is expected to get interesting. But even Peeping Toms lose their enthusiasm when the sights aren't provocative. Shyamalan raises our interest until an hour into the film with insinuating camera pans and well-planned one-take scenes. Then he loses it in one dubious move, putting a gun in a child's hands.

From that point, a viewer's instinct raises questions that aren't answered fairly. The Sixth Sense made one want to see the film again, to confirm how we were snookered. Unbreakable won't tempt many into a second chance.

Willis is solid, playing Dunn with the same mellow terror he invested in The Sixth Sense. The presence of young Clark is a distraction, since his role and skills aren't on the same level as Haley Joel Osment. Wright has little to do except extend the question of whether the Dunn marriage can be saved.

Jackson is magnetic as ever; you may stare at an answering machine just because his deep voice is coming out of it. But his character starts vague and winds up incredible, although perhaps not to disciples of the comic books Elijah claims are a reflection of civilization. Share that ideal, or simply shake your head in disbelief.

The lack of faith Shyamalan has in his own story is evident at the start and finish of the film. An introductory list of factoids about the popularity of comic books feels like an alibi for what won't be important for nearly an hour. The fade-out offers one of those annoying, bogus updates about fictional characters, telling us who ended up happy or sad. It wouldn't be necessary, if anything made us believe these folks were credible to start with.

Unbreakable isn't a bad movie, but it certainly isn't an auspicious encore to one of the most popular films of all time. This time, I see disappointed people.

Film review

Unbreakable

• Grade: B-
• Director: M. Night Shyamalan
• Cast: Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Wright Penn, Spencer Treat Clark
• Screenplay: M. Night Shyamalan
• Rating: PG-13; violence, profanity
• Running time: 104 min.

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