Either You Get It, or You Don't

Rating: 10/10 (7 August 2001)

The way to think about this movie as you are watching it, is to imagine it as a comic book brought to film. Not like X-Men or even Superman, where it's all action with little attention to detail or story. It's hard for people who don't read comics and look down on them in general to believe, but there ARE a lot of comic books out there that are more cerebral than any book or novel they ever read. This is THAT type of comic.
Yes, a few of the plot points are far fetched, but that's the way it is with a comic book, or even a novel. It's called "suspension of disbelief" and it means that you just accept the story and don't nitpick every minor detail. If you can't do that, then you will never enjoy ANY work of fiction, no matter how High Brow. "How could it work out that the two main characters just happen to live in the same city?" "How did Elijah's physical therapist just happen to be David's wife?" Because it is a story and it works out better for the story if those things happen that way.
The other thing I see most people questioning is this "How could he have never been sick, never been injured, and not know it?"
That one actually has a very simple psychological answer that has nothing to do with fiction. It's called repression of the past. Your mind is an amazing thing. It can have all kinds of knowledge stored up inside it, that you don't access because a decision is made by you subconsciously that you DON"T want to know, or remember. Have you ever met someone who was sexually abused as a child, but didn't even know it until they were thirty? I have. It's because on some level their mind decided they could either have that in their head all the time, or the knowledge of the abuse could be pushed to a back corner of the mind, never to be thought of again. It happens all the time.
Bruce Willis' character repeats throughout the movie "I'm just a regular guy. I'm just a regular guy." That's the same thing his mind has been repeating all these years, convincing him he was normal until he had no knowledge of the fact that he wasn't. The more Elijah made him see the truth, the more David was trying to convince himself other wise. He wanted a normal life. He wanted to be with his girlfriend for the rest of his life. And so his mind cut off any knowledge he might have had of his true nature. It made him blind to the fact that he had never been sick. It made him blind to the fact that he had never been hurt. It is even hinted at in the flashback sequence that the decision to fake the injury after the accident was made subconsciously.
The bottom line about this movie is: either you get it, or you don't. You don't have to be well versed in comic books to enjoy this movie. But you do have to be able take in all the details. There are NO insignificant details in this movie. Everything that is said or done is done for a reason, and leads to something else later in the movie. If you don't have the temperament to be able to take it all in, you won't understand or like this movie.