Unbreakable - what a load of twaddle!

Rating: 3/10 (4 February 2007)

I seem to remember my opinion of M Night Shyamalan going up slightly after watching this. Not that Unbreakable was any good - just that it was a hell of a lot better than the God-awful The Sixth Sense. Rewatching bad films isn't something I make a habit of doing, but this one came on TV at a time when I didn't have control of the remote, and since I remembered the film being the best of Shyamalan's works, I didn't run for the hills. Anyway, I'm not quite sure what I was thinking upon my first viewing; as not only is Unbreakable a stupid and rather boring film, it's also completely pointless, riddled with plot holes and fails to make it's audience care about anything they've spent over one hundred minutes watching by the time it ends. The film starts by showing the audience a baby with a bone disease. From there, we move onto a train accident in which David Dunn is the only survivor. He is sought out by a man named Elijah Price - the grown up version of the baby at the start. Price is a comic book aficionado, and has a theory about Dunn's miraculous survival - he believes Dunn to be a real-life superhero...
Comic books aren't such a big thing here in England, so maybe this sort of thing will mean more to Americans; but even so, that doesn't disguise the fact that this is a story that doesn't really work in a modern context, and it's one that requires it's viewer to have the mentality of a young teenager in order to buy into what's going on. The plot requires the unlucky viewer to suspend their disbelief on numerous occasions, and this faith is never rewarded. Given Shyamalan's track record, it's obvious that this film is leading up to a big surprise ending, and not only is the ending not a big surprise - it's entirely stupid and doesn't make one once of sense if you think about it. It would seem that Shyamalan does respect his audience at all, and this is shown by the fact that he gives us any number of motives that no one in their right mind would harbour, and expects us to believe in them! The finale for the central character is simply dumped on the audience and feels pointless for that reason, and not even the star profiles of Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson can save this one. Unbreakable is a great big joke...which isn't even funny since I've sat through it twice.