Excellent follow up to The Sixth Sense.

Rating: 8/10 (5 May 2009)

I remember being unimpressed with Unbreakable when it was first released, I think mostly because they had the bizarre idea of casting Samuel L. Jackson, the Badass Motherf#%ker himself, as a man whose bones break so easily that he can hardly leave the house. The Sixth Sense is a hell of a debut film to follow up, but in retrospect I would argue that M. Night Shyamalan did a great job of it with Unbreakable. The movie has received mixed responses from critics and the public alike, but it is inarguably an interesting experience as an example of a young writer and director carving a spot for himself in the film-making world while running with the big dogs.
Comic book aficionados are likely to find a lot of fascinating material to chew on in Unbreakable, although I also enjoyed the film immensely despite a total lack of interest in comic books. Shyamalan takes a certain aspect of the potential historical meaning and significance of comic book mythology and crafts it into a superhero thriller that is entirely his own, which is no small achievement.
Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis play Elijah Price and David Dunn, respectively. We meet David soon after a spectacular train crash that leaves every single passenger dead and himself without a scratch, and we meet Elijah minutes after his birth, the trauma of which broke both of his delicate arms and legs. Elijah grows up to be high-class salesman of rare and priceless comic book art, the results of a childhood limited to the safety of his room and his comic collection, while David grows up to be a security guard at a sports stadium.
Elijah discovers David as a result of his surviving the train crash, and he becomes convinced that David's strength is the exact antithesis of his own weakness, and that this "power" connects them. The movie explores Elijah's efforts to convince David of his theory and David's gradual understanding of what exactly that theory means. Given the supernatural nature of it, he becomes less and less impressed with Elijah's persistence.
The movie is a fascinating ride and tells a compelling story despite being peppered with the same kind of plot holes that plagued The Sixth Sense, although here I seemed less willing to accept them. David never noticed, for example, the fact that he has never been sick or even mildly injured in all of his life until Elijah pointed it out to him. For someone with a career in high school football that ended as a result of an injury that he was forced to fake, this seems like more than a little bit of a stretch.
Shyamalan comes through on the public expectation of a good twist at the end of his movies, and while the twist in this one isn't as brilliant as that in The Sixth Sense, it's still unexpected and leaps and bounds beyond the laughable twist at the end of The Village. The moody tone and photography is characteristic of Shyamalan's work, as is Willis' subdued performance. There are times when the film's score picks up with nothing really carrying it, but the movie has a solid story and sure-handed direction that ensures that even the most judicious of us can let go and enjoy the ride. It's not his best work (that's probably still The Sixth Sense), but clearly Shyamalan's first three films were his best work so far, and after three increasingly disappointing films in a row, I hope he goes back to the kinds of stories that he tells best before he ends up going straight to DVD. After Lady in the Water and The Happening, he's not far off