Plodding, uninteresting, forgettable

Rating: 3/10 (6 March 2007)

Going way back, I felt "The Sixth Sense" was a brilliant piece of film-making. I believed that M. Night Shyamalan had some real talent.
I missed "Unbreakable" during its first run. I saw "The Village", which was horrible, and "Lady in the Water", which was at least entertaining.
Looking for some signs that Shyamalan was, indeed, a talented writer/director, I reached back to finally watch "Unbreakable." What a completely uninteresting film.
The real problem is Shyamalan spends so much time trying to make this familial bond between the hero, his estranged wife, and his son, that he saps any possible tension or excitement or wonder out of this film. During most of the film, we just see these three characters mope around. There isn't even any real character development going on here, just three horribly depressed characters shuffling through life.
Well, there's four horribly depressed characters, because Shyamalan throws in the wise comic book collector, who's also depressed because he's prone to injury. Gads, there wasn't a single interesting character in the entire film. Shyamalan really fails to create any connection between these characters and the viewer. There's no engagement, no interest, nothing.
And without having characters to care about, the rest of the movie falls absolutely flat. In a thriller, you can't have tension if you don't care about the people in jeopardy. And he does a terrible job with the tension he does try to create. There's one completely pointless scene where "our hero" thinks he finds a terrorist at a football game, but the guy is just a nobody who gets let go. Where is the tension in that? Yes, there's a scene towards the end involving criminals that's fairly well done, but by this time you've invested over an hour watching uninteresting people, this one sequence is hardly enough to redeem the film.
To make matters worse, the Shyamalan-customary "twist ending" is so completely uninteresting as to be a non-event by itself. And that was the big climax! 3 out of 10 stars, this film has practically no redeeming characteristics. The score isn't that bad, and the aforementioned criminal scene is somewhat watchable. Not as bad as The Village, but pretty close.