a stylish dead end

Rating: Null/10 (22 September 2001)

As both a writer and a director, M. Night Shyamalan is attempting to bring a whole new sensibility to American moviemaking. Unlike most filmmakers who dabble in the `horror film' genre, Shyamalan eschews sensationalism and gore in favor of understatement, subtlety and indirection, preferring that we, in the audience, be given room to conjure up our own demons rather than having the filmmaker do it for us. The characters in his films drift like somnambulists through worlds drained of sound, color and emotion - and where the fine line between the normal and the abnormal, the natural and the supernatural, the real and the surreal is vague and easily crossed.
Shymalan scored a major critical and commercial success in 1999 with `The Sixth Sense,' a film so brilliantly conceived and executed that it cried out for multiple viewings  the first time to be amazed and dazzled by the sheer ingeniousness of the multileveled plotting, the second to study retroactively just how intricately each plot element fell into place, catching us unawares the first time around.
It is natural that Shyamalan should have tried to duplicate that success in his next film, using virtually the same stylistic elements and the same leading man, Bruce Willis, as he did in `The Sixth Sense.' Unfortunately, `Unbreakable' fails to live up to the quality of the earlier film. For one thing, `The Sixth Sense' really WENT someplace  it built and built to an infinitely satisfying resolution. `Unbreakable,' for all its admirable stylistic flourishes, simply leads us to a dead end  nay, worse, a conclusion that is absurd, undeveloped and thoroughly unsatisfying.

Shyamalan's subdued narrative and visual style needs a solid dramatic core to attach itself to. Here, however, he never finds it. Willis plays a character almost too similar to the one he portrayed in `The Sixth Sense'  a brooding, taciturn man who seems to wander through life in a perpetual emotionless fog of detachment and depression. David Dunn, a man caught in what appears to be a loveless, deteriorating marriage, is the sole survivor of a Philadelphia train wreck. Already we are alerted to `Sixth Sense' parallels, so much so that we begin to subconsciously suspect that this might indeed be a sequel of sorts to the previous film. Actually, it isn't, but rest assured there is something `not quite right' about this man, although the revelation of what it is has no where near the kick provided by the earlier work. After his miraculous escape, David is contacted by Elijah Price, played by Samuel L. Jackson, a man suffering from a strange genetic illness that causes his bones to shatter like glass and who becomes convinced that David may be his alter ego, i.e. a man immune from injury and disease. This premise, based on a builtin dichotomy (just as `The Sixth Sense' was built on the dichotomy of life and death), also tries to explore the twin dichotomies of good vs. evil and hero vs. villain, but the context in which the filmmakers launch their exploration  the world of comic books of all things  robs the film of much of its potential profundity. We just can't take Willis very seriously when he is wandering stoically around the city, clad in a hooded sweatshirt, like some sort of `super hero' on Prozac, saving innocent victims from the clutches of evildoers whose purposes he senses when he brushes up against them in crowds (the tag line for this film could well be `I see criminals').
Thus, without a decent story to tell, the film turns out to be all style and no substance. What was artistry in `The Sixth Sense' becomes artiness here. Even clever visual motifs - like showing us many images upside down first, then right side up or having only the bad guys dressed in bright colors so that they stand out against the muted grays of everyone else - become sheer artifice with no thematic purpose behind them.
`Unbreakable,' for all its beauty of atmosphere and tone, leaves us bewildered, frustrated and unsatisfied. Shyamalan is definitely a talent worth nurturing. Let's hope next time he can once again find that perfect marriage between form and content that he hit upon so brilliantly in `The Sixth Sense.' We need adventurous filmmakers like him around.