Wasted ideas, terrible pacing.

Rating: Null/10 (20 January 2001)

I was one of the seven people on the planet who didn't think much of The Sixth Sense, so I had no real interest in seeing M. Night Shyamalan's follow-up, Unbreakable. I have to admit that my instincts were wrong. I walked into the movie thinking it would be only an average film, a time-passer and nothing more; imagine my surprise when it turned out to be absolute crap. I was bored almost immediately, and the only thing stopping me from walking out was that I wanted to write a bad review of the whole film and not just the first half hour.
It was excruciatingly boring, suffering from one of the worst cases of plot constipation I've ever seen. Everyone spoke too slowly, with quiet voices punctuated by longs sighs, and with big pauses between sentences. By an hour into the movie, I was finishing the lines in my head before the actors had reached their third word. It was so, so slow. This worked well enough in The Sixth Sense and helped to make the occasionally spooky atmosphere, but here it was laughable and slowed the movie down even further. I'm not an impatient viewer, I'm not the kind who gets bored if there's not something being blown up on screen, but this was relentlessly, frustratingly slow.
Aside from its dull delivery, the dialogue wasn't natural at all, and didn't go far enough in the other direction to be impressively stylised. It was just stilted, and too obviously tried to explain the plot, as if Shyamalan didn't think we could work it out for ourselves or had doubts about its credibility. Where one line would have been enough, we were treated to four or five that said the same thing or made the same point.
It's hard to go into details about the plot because its power comes from surprising the audience and would be easily ruined, but there were some great ideas in it and a great twist at the end that were completely wasted by being fed through the Sixth-Sense-O-Matic. It was filmed so much like its forerunner that it spoofed itself, ruining and belittling its own ideas. If the point was to put a superhero into real life it didn't work because this movie isn't like real life at all.
Shyamalan needs to try something different on his next movie if he is to convince as a major talent, and stop making it look like he films everything in a library. What makes great directors great is their versatility, not necessarily in genre but in style; Hitchcock stayed mainly with thrillers but his direction was rarely predictable. Like Andrew Niccol, Shyamalan is an imaginative writer with great ideas but I'm not convinced he makes it as a director.
The overwhelming impression is that this was a great idea wasted by its execution and funeral-procession pacing. I can't explain just how badly the time dragged; imagine tying bricks to a clock and having a lazy tortoise pull it through setting concrete. When the end credits started to roll I felt like I'd been paroled, and I couldn't make it to the doors fast enough. That said, when Shyamalan's next movie appears I'll see it because I'm convinced that his imagination will eventually lead to a great movie.