Broken (Rating 2 out of 10)

Rating: 1/10 (24 December 2001)

SPOILERS AHEAD: With what should hopefully be a long and illustrious movie career still ahead, an early-days setback like Unbreakable shouldn't do lasting damage to writer/director M. Night Shyamalan's reputation. A pity, though, that the one responsible for Sixth Sense should have rushed (or been rushed into) this vacuous clunker, a movie that would surely never have found production funding nor distribution had it not been for the bankability of its predecessor.
A back-of-the-envelope job at best, Unbreakable is so burdened with the weight of its own self-perceived significance that what starts as a mildly intriguing probe of superhero mythology runs out of track faster than the train wreck from which Bruce Willis miraculously escapes. Thereafter, its déjà vu all the way, and not only because Willis is as animated as a rivet: the film's look is so saturated (literally) with Se7en atmospherics that it's a wonder they didn't re-title this Unbr8kable.
But Willis, justifiably catatonic in Sixth Sense, can't be blamed for playing it in identical fashion here. After all, if you're on the verge of discovering you're the Caped Crusader, then furrowed brow and hushed tones are probably par for the course.
If one is charitable, Willis's casting is a deliberately ironic nod in the direction of his string vest Die Hard persona. Then again, and rather less charitably, explanation might be thought to reside in a fast-buck dash to the bank by all concerned with Unbreakable -- a suspicion reinforced by the formulaic reprise of Sixth Sense elements, including an introspective Willis, a small boy, supernatural overtones and, most blatant of all, a 'twist' at the end.
With virtually nothing to do for most of the movie -- indeed, virtually nothing at all happens in most of the movie -- Willis has only one real and two ersatz characters to play against, respectively his wife (Robin Wright) and his young son (Spencer Treat Clark) and The Mysterious Mister Glass (Samuel L. Jackson.)
Angst, alienation and ambiguity hallmark the relationship with Mrs Caped Crusader, and if that's what you fancy for a fun night out well, good for you: after all, there are some people who think The Ice Storm is a masterpiece, too.
But whilst there's a narrative logic for The Longsuffering Wife's existence, no such justification attaches to The Small Boy. We've been there, seen it, and got the T-shirt, and a half century on there's still very little in cinema to match the power of Shane -- certainly not Unbreakable, where hand-me-down theming results less in 21st Century drama as 19th Century melodramatics, culminating here in a Small Boy points Big Gun at Heroic Father scene that's as daft of concept as it is inept of execution.
For God's sake, you're thinking. Pull the bloody trigger and then we can all get home early.
But no. Willis lives to meet Samuel L. Jackson again, and Jackson lives, cinematically at least, long enough to prove that his current knack of picking losers remains undimmed.
Having headlined Rules of Engagement, a movie so dire it even needed an explanatory end-credits text roll to rescue the script, here's Jackson in yet another movie that does the same thing, albeit the post-narrative text here might have been excusable had it been revised to read: `Bruce Willis was found guilty of excessive gravitas, Samuel L. Jackson was found guilty of wearing a Very Bad Wig, and both were sentenced to appear in the next film to be directed by Clint Eastwood.'
Given the rehashing of Willis, Small Boy, and supernatural from Sixth Sense, a twist at the end of Unbreakable was bound to be shovelled in. Unfortunately, one can only be surprised by something credible, or half credible, and that's certainly not the case here, where the motivational rationale posited for Jackson is as persuasive as the notion that Hitler invaded a lot of countries merely because he was in search of a good Geography teacher.
An exploitative shambles, then, from start to finish, and a sour one at that, the sequence involving a psycho-killer home-invader as gratuitously nasty as anything to be found in Hollywood's MMM (Murder Movies for Morons) genre and a clear indicator of everything that's wrong with Unbreakable: no warmth, no joy, no humanity, no surprises.
Memo to Mr Shyamalan: Willis, Wright and Jackson all deserve much more. So, too, do audiences. Score: 2 out of 10.