Dad, do you think you could beat up Bruce Lee?

Rating: Null/10 (9 March 2012)

While directors like Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma are routinely compared to Alfred Hitchcock (Spielberg's too infatuated with special effects, and De Palma's too camp, too baroque), M. Night Shyamalan's a better fit. Shyamalan's scores often reference Bernard Hermann, he shares Hitchcock's penchant for walk-on cameos, the macabre, stretching scenes out to breaking point and like Hitchcock adores elevating pulpy material (while Hitch was all about spy movies, murder, horror and sleaze, Shyamalan's chewing on comic books, UFOs, aliens and ghosts).
More than this, though, Shyamalan's films are brimming with Hitchcockian camera angles, compositions, camera work, and hinge on the kind of low-key, restrained set pieces that Hitchcock long perfected. Like Hitch he also fine-tunes every inch of his screenplays, storyboarding heavily and polishing his dialogue. This lends his films a very mannered style. Classy, family friendly insidiousness.
Of course Shyamalan's not in the same league as Hitchcock. Not even close. But on a strictly surface level he does at times deliver the same kind of aesthetic rush. You might say Shyamalan's best films all blend some of Hitchcock's "Frenzy", "Psycho", "Marnie" and "Birds", with a little "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" thrown in for good measure; goofy pulp meets some serious paranoia.
Like Hitch, there's also a thin religious thread running through Shyamalan's work. With Hitch we had some low key Catholicism in "I, Confess" and "The Wrong Man" (amongst others), and of course with Shyamalan you have his early Christian features, and later his alien invasion movie "Signs". And while "The Wrong Man" is an excellent noir undermined by hokey Christian salvation, "Signs" is one of the best alien invasion movies....if you completely ignore its regressive reliance on "Christian signs" and divine intervention (the film even ends with a giant crucifix).
There are other similarities too. Hitchcock deemed film a "low art", and did his best to stay clear of "big issues" and "weighty topics", yet had no qualms about structuring some of his films as political allegories, most notably "Lifeboat", ostensibly a disaster movie but actually conceived as a WW2 era call to arms, solidarity and mobilisation. Echoing this is Shyamalan's "The Happening". Aesthetically the film's "Birds" meets "Body Snatches" meets Romero, but politically it's one of the more interesting post-9/11 monster movies (compare it to "Mist", "War of the Words", "Cloverfield" etc). Where those films typically watch as hapless whites are stomped on by faceless bogeymen and nasty monsters-cum-terrorists, though, "The Happening" deals with - if one ignores its more obvious eco-message - what military tacticians typically call "blow-back" (violence directed toward the civilian population of aggressor governments). Here, our Americans heroes are literally set upon by "terrorist suicide bombers", in the form of suicide inducing trees and vegetation, because they indiscriminately "trample on territory that does not belong to them". Overlap Shyamalan's foliage with the West's recent Middle Eastern Crusades, and the message is clear; the "trees" want payback.
Shyamalan directed "Unbreakable" in 2000, an attempt to imbue your typical "comic book movie" with gravitas. The film finds Bruce Willis playing David Dunne (like Marvel heroes, his first and last names start with the same letter), a stadium security guard (he misses his previous calling as a football star; a calling his wife, a caregiver, deems "violent") who is the sole survivor of a train accident. After the accident David is contacted by Elijah Price (Samuel Jackson), the proprietor of a comic book museum. Elijah convinces David that he has both superpowers and a responsibility to use his gifts for "the greater good". Meanwhile Elijah, who suffers a rare brittle-bone disease, is revealed to be a "super villain", a demented terrorist who is responsible for thousands of deaths. Elijah sees David as his antithesis, a man who is quite literally unbreakable. "If someone like me exists, there has to be someone else at the opposite end of the spectrum!" Elijah yells. It's an opinion oft voiced in comic books: the super-villain is both a reaction again, and the cause of, the super hero, and vice versa.
It's a very good film, stylish, every scene directed with a certain flair. But "Unbreakable" is also far less radical than it thinks. Shyamalan doesn't rewrite the superhero rule book, he simply...slows....things....down; behind the solemnity, David's character arc is typical of the genre. Bizarrely, David's super abilities are treated as being a fact, rather than something more ambiguous. The result is that David is "definitely a super hero" (complete with super hero costume and weakness), which results in Elijah "definitely becoming a super villain", rather than something more ambiguous and disturbing.
Interestingly, while the film outright acknowledges that David has super powers, it then thoroughly dispels any fantasies of heroism by ending with David calling the cops rather than using his superpowers to defeat Elijah. In this way David grants Elijah the unkindest gesture. Similarly, in David's big action set piece, Shyamalan goes out of his way to stress how much David relies on outside help to defeat a murderous kidnapper. He's not a full superhero...yet.
But though the film downplays its "white saviour angles", it still ends up affirming them with its racially dubious overtones. "Do you know what the scariest thing is? To not know your place in this world, to not know why you're here," Elijah says, echoing a theme found in most of Shyamalan's films, in which characters struggle to figure out their identities, or where exactly they fit into the archetypal fairytale. In "Unbreakable", it's clear where black dudes fit; literally behind the bars of a Mister Muscle security guard.
8/10 – Worth two viewings.