Solid, but by no means Unbreakable

Rating: Null/10 (7 December 2000)

As it was for his first film, M. Night neither impressed me nor disappointed me. This film is definitely nothing special, and The Sixth Sense was even more so incredibly overrated.
First order of business: Bruce Willis was pretty darn good in comparison to other films he's appeared in, such as Armageddon, but remained nothing extraordinary. I could just as well say the same for Samuel L. Jackson, though he has had a more impressive track record than Willis (as far as performances). Robin Wright Penn also had a sold performance, though I am not one to criticize acting with much strength. The atmosphere was almost a mirror image to the atmosphere of Sixth Sense, though it was a bit warmer. Many of the cinematography techniques were original, but I think many would agree with my complaint of overuse of original ideas, which really ran this film into the ground. Creativity is great, but overuse can kill. The framing of the train scene is beautiful, but monotonous. The spiraling over the comic book was extremely predictable and in this particular case, not creative. The overuse of hand held camera was useless, because it provoked the wrong emotion in a few instances. The theme was steady, but as his last film M. Night only gives us a few minutes to ponder its existence in the last few seconds of the film. Not to say that surprise endings are bad, but if one is attempting to get across an intelligent message, one should let the audience ponder in it a bit longer, along with the characters. I'd have to say it is an intelligent marketing technique though. Perhaps the reasoning for a quick, spontaneous ending was to surpass the lack of depth in the theme: "Without evil, there would be no good" to impress with the entertaining and surfaced story. It seems the film builds up to a stark nothing that instills a feeling of emptiness, which pointlessly juxtaposes the redemption in Willis' character. The captions were utterly pointless at the end, probably the most disappointing conclusion I've witnessed in some while.
In other words, if you like The Sixth Sense, you will most likely enjoy this. If you though the Sixth Sense was somewhat pretentious, surfaced, and extremely overrated, I am almost sure you will obtain that similar feeling though this film.
**1/2 of ****