very well made, but curiously stupid

Rating: 6/10 (9 October 2003)

"Unbreakable" is an extremely well-crafted film. The acting is mostly terrific, with Bruce Willis cementing his position as almost the only actor who can convincingly fill a certain kind of role: an unpretentious, quiet, blue-collar man, no intellectual but also no fool, well-meaning but no saint. As in "The Sixth Sense", he is on quiet, controlled form here, but in this film he's more regularly the centre of attention, and he's sufficiently magnetic to carry it off. Samuel L. Jackson, the perfect Tarantino actor, also excels in a completely different, much more restrained aesthetic.
The production is in many ways as good as the performances: measured, pretty dour and unvarnished. Within individual scenes the writing is usually fine, and some of the staging is memorably done - although the director's obsession with precise storyboarding does yield a certain inertia, making this largely a film of fluent compositions rather than dramatic scenes. The trouble is that all this sophisticated film-making can't disguise the fundamental lack of intelligence behind it. It's not that the plot is silly or the idea self-evidently implausible -- that is very rarely a problem so long as the film is made with conviction -- it's just that the idea isn't illuminating, it doesn't tell us much about anyone or anything. Its impression of seriousness is bogus.
The family drama which occupies the foreground most of the time is in fact incredibly ordinary: if you imagine this story shorn of its fantastical elements, it would barely pass muster as a TV movie of the week; and (more damagingly) that family story is in no way enriched or even much affected by the journeys taken by Willis's and Jackson's characters. And I don't even think that this film tells us much about comic books or superhero origin stories -- certainly little that isn't squeezed into the opening couple of minutes of Ang Lee's "The Ice Storm" (itself no masterpiece). It's very strange to see so much professionalism and care in all departments lavished on such a thin, underwhelming, half-baked idea for a movie.