People get paid for making stuff like this?

Rating: Null/10 (30 July 2002)

I'd heard from friends how bad this movie was. It was on Encore, I had the time. Now I want my two hours back.
When I watched THE SIXTH SENSE, I believed every second of it. This is just the opposite. There's hardly a minute, a scene or a character that rings true.
The premise of the film is that Bruce Willis's character is actually a comic book superhero. OK. This could have been interesting. But since Mr. Willis is forty-five years old here, it makes us wonder why his character didn't catch on to this a little sooner. Like thirty years sooner.
Samuel L. Jackson talks to Willis's character about how in working as a security guard at a university stadium he has gravitated to a job where he protects people. OK. But if this urge to protect and help people is so strong, why isn't he a policeman, fireman, or emergency medical technician? Working stadium security isn't a job that gives a guy a chance to be heroic all that often. And since his character is a college graduate, this also casts the guy in the position of being an underachiever. We suspect that it's his wife- a physical therapist- who largely supports the family.
And Willis' poor son. The boy is in some weird school that's in session on Saturday. Think about it. The boy gets in trouble at school, Willis is summoned from a football game. When do universities play their games. Right. So why is the boy in school on a Saturday afternoon? And the idiotic scene where he holds his parents at gunpoint. This gives the actors a chance to talk to him about how friends don't shoot friends, dialog that the actors must have been paid very handsomely to spit out of their mouths.
I've read that UNBREAKABLE was supposed to be the first in a trilogy, but since audiences stayed away from it in droves the other two films will never be made. Maybe they made sense of what happens in this one by expanding on these same themes. We'll never know.
But knowing that the same director/writer made CIRCLES which opens this week, I've already crossed that one off my list. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.