Unfortunate

Rating: 4/10 (30 June 2001)

I had high hopes for "Unbreakable," after M. Knight Shymalyan's terrific "The Sixth Sense". Sadly, all the things that worked so well with "The Sixth Sense" work against "Unbreakable". Shymalayan, the director seriously undercut Shymalayann, the writer, by eliminating a key scene (between a priest and Bruce Willis) which ties the film together better than anything else in its two plus tedious hours.
Willis plays David Duncan, the head of security at the ball park,
who discovers, he is not only the ONLY survivor of a train derailment, he has not been hurt in any way. He is contacted by Elijah Price (Samuel Jackson), a "comic book art" collector, who tries to convince Willis that he and Willis are linked. Elijah, you see, has a rare, serious bone deficiency, which results in his bones breaking easily; Elijah believes that Willis is super strong and nearly invulnerable, but doesn't know it.
A BIG problem with the movie, is that the story shows only one character (Elijah) as a child. Better if Elijay and David had been born in the same year, or even better, the same day. Worse, it fails to provide any clues that any of the "accidents" which have occured are anything more than "accidents." Thus, the climactic "payoff" is no "payoff" at all.

Much of the time this movie appears to be going no where. Willis' character is dull, his wife (Robin Wright Penn) is dull and drab (and also looks ten years older than she is), and Jackson's character is simply too strange to generate much sympathy.
Shymalyan really blew this one.