M. Night round two.

Rating: 8/10 (12 July 2001)

Unbreakable focuses on the phenomenal qualities of its fictitious characters and builds a story around their pursuit toward self-discovery.
Perceiving as miraculous the fact that he was the only survivor of a tragic train wreck, David Dunn (Bruce Willis) is further stunned by the fact that he experienced no physical harm. A middle-aged security guard and frustrated football player, whose marriage to Audrey (Robin Wright Penn) and whose apathetic relationship with his son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark) are about to collapse, David appears to find no purpose to his survival and wanders through life with no definite course. Yet one day, David is unexpectedly summoned by Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), a character which --it has been initially established-- suffers from a rare bone disease which, since birth, has made him utterly "breakable". Now an eccentric owner of an exclusive comic book art gallery with an unclear interest in David, Elijah, who has developed a psychological dependence on comic book heroes and villains, tries to persuade his "unbreakable" counterpart to define his severance as an innate, superhuman.
Unbreakable explores the events that surround its characters in a slow-paced manner, which toys with the viewer by delivering information conservatively. While David Dunn is portrayed as an apathetic character (seen in its relationship with other characters and enhanced by the actor's performance), the eccentricity and flamboyance of Elijah --which is delineated by performance, costume design, as well as point of view-- renders this character much more intriguing. While Unbreakable relies on carefully stylized depictions to construct its characters' subjective worlds and realities, the film's plot evolves from a simplistic, economic narration of identifiable and realistic events. This complex choice establishes a kind of schizophrenic setup aimed at misleading the viewer and at eventually startling him or her with an unsuspected (surprise) ending. (This strategy was much more efficiently exploited in the director's The Sixth Sense.)
Interestingly, the scenes in Unbreakable contain all the clues necessary for the attentive viewer to "guesstimate" on a first viewing the total meaning of the film's obscure and puzzling pieces, and to prove this meaning on a second viewing; a choice which seems to point more to a subtle marketing strategy. This trick of testing the viewer with clues while emphasizing the deceiving nature of Unbreakable is quickly established when the young Elijah's mother tries the boy's interest in the unknown plot of a comic book she has given him, by stating: "They say this one has a surprise ending." In this manner, the nature of Unbreakable's plot is likened to that of an unread comic book, and its characters, to the heroes and archenemies of the same. All in all, Unbreakable is a film which successfully creates a playful relationship with the viewer, and which establishes the "unbreakable" quality of its mysterious premise as a measure for its own effective narrative strategy.