Even comic book heroes get the blues

Rating: 9/10 (4 January 2012)

This underrated film is a pleasant antidote to Hollywood's emphasis on special effects. Bruce Willis is a reluctant superhero who takes years to come to grips with his powers – a form of psychic sensitivity, unnatural strength, and, of course, the fact that he is almost indestructible. Samuel L. Jackson is his antithesis – cerebral (Willis, as I said, has trouble figuring things out), physically fragile to the point of being known as Mr Glass, and for most of the film, relatively immobile and confined to a wheelchair. This film's strong points are its dark, muted colours, its lazy rhythm (long shot lengths) combined with constant slow panning, and its cast. Willis is terrific as a man psychically tortured by his strengths (he has trouble connecting with his wife, his job, and his life in general) who is trying to flee the growing realisation that he doesn't belong, while Jackson is excellent as a man emotionally twisted by his physical impotence. The dialogue is terse, minimalist, and contextualised in an intelligent way, since the thesis-antithesis plot is voiced mostly by Jackson in his character as an art dealer specialising in comic books. Appropriately, the visual imagery analysed and presented by Jackson (which is largely correct, BTW, especially the emphasis on large heads and skewed eyes on villains) acts as a counterpoint and bait to Willis, a kind of blind Argos. Willis' son communicates well the appropriate stunned look of alienation, so we understand his emotional investment in helping his father understand his destiny. The denouement is interesting: Jackson sees all, at least in terms of the comic book logic that has been his one crutch throughout his life, yet we discover that he is just as emotionally crippled as he is physically weak, while Willis slowly comes to see his role not as someone made special by his powers, but as someone whose destiny is to be conventionally honest, moral and kind. What is the message? That real heroism is facing the everyday "evil" of banality (Willis is a security guard who lives in a somewhat grotty home)? Perhaps. I don't think that other actors could have worked so well together to convey this slowly growing tension between blindness and sight, strength and weakness. Okay, Shyamalan has been parodied especially on Robot Chicken for sticking to his formulaic "twists" that seem too pat, too deus ex machina, but here it works because the underlying narrative structure of the filmic action is the simple black or white logic of comic book morality. Even for the tortured superheroes that have followed on the heels of Spiderman, a sudden twist at the end is appropriate for the war of good and evil. I don't think he chose the comic book backstory for Jackson's character by accident. Yet, despite the apparent simplicity of the moral imperatives that are its backbone, the film manages to provoke.