Unbreakable is barely bearable

Rating: 1/10 (28 March 2009)

Some other reviewers have compared this to the "Sixth Sense," an earlier movie starring Bruce Willis. The problem is that the writer and director of the Sixth Sense knew what their story was about and developed it beautifully. This is not the case with "Unbearable." The director put together a film that is dark, dreary and slow paced, with an irritating omnipresent dirge as the sound track. The story is disjointed, confusing and unbelievable. I mean at times I thought it was supposed to be some avant garde surreal or experimental film, where everything is some sort of symbolism. I usually don't get what the director is trying to say in those modernistic movies. Unfortunately, "Unbreakable" was not that good and no easier to follow.
Bruce Willis plays a security guard with a wife and child that he is apparently simultaneously estranged from and living with. In college he had a promising football career until he and his wife (its not clear whether they were married yet) were in an auto accident that ended his football career. Most of the movie is spent with his son and Samuel Jackson (playing the security guard's polar opposite, a brittle boned and accident prone comic book collector, trying to convince the security guard that he is really supposed to be a superhero.
Eventually he is convinced to spend an evening as a kind of vigilante looking for some evildoing to thwart, sort of like a neighborhood watch volunteer who goes on patrol with no cell phone to call 911, no flashlight, and no weapon. We are shown a brief sequence of crimes that he ignores. In addition to being "unbreakable," he is apparently unwittingly psychic and gets some idea of who is thinking about a criminal act. At about that time we hear one of the family say something such as "at last its over." I hoped that was the final scene but no such luck. There is a final twist which apparently we are somehow supposed to figure out from newspaper clippings on a wall. It is clear from his horrified facial expression that the security guard understands the twist and then lets the audience in on what the clippings mean.
The only reason I didn't shut this off before it was finished was I had invested time watching it and wanted to at least learn where the director was going with this. What a waste of good actors!