Any sophomore effort is overly critiqued and scrutinized. Especially when the freshman project is as successful as M. Night Shyamalan's Sixth Sense, a movie that was truly great, unique, and with a great hook at the end. However, even taking all due kindness and consideration to that fact into account, Unbreakable, M. Night Shyamalan's new movie, disappoints in almost every sense of the word.
What makes this movie so truly disappointing is that it could have been great. The premise was intriguing and the cast stellar. It is in the execution, the dialogue, and the pacing where the movie falls through.
The plot, and don't worry, I won't give away the twist at the end, is basically an adult comic book. Bruce Willis plays a man who is literally Unbreakable. Nothing can harm him, well only one thing can, but you'll have to watch the movie to find out what, and he is incredibly strong. He also possesses the ability to sense things about people by touching them. Somehow, and this is one of the most implausible things about this movie, he never realizes or appreciates the powers he has until he is involved in a train wreck and is the only survivor.
Samuel L. Jackson plays a man with a bone disease who is the complete opposite of Willis's character. His disease makes his bones incredibly brittle, so brittle that his arms and legs are broken when he is born. Because of his infirmity, he develops his mind and his imagination. He owns an exclusive art gallery. One that only deals in comic book art. Something he takes very seriously. He has spent his whole life searching for a hero. When he hears of the train wreck with its sole survivor, he's sure that he's found that hero.
Most of the movie involves Jackson's attempts to cajole Willis into accepting who he is and to take on the mantle of super-hero. The movie drags on and on as Willis struggles to accept his powers. The drab gray colors the film is shot in adds to the heavy weariness of the movie. It's interesting that one of the few bright colors in the movie is the light blue jacket worn by the director in his cameo appearance. No one smiles, the humor is almost non-existent. The pace is equal to a snail's.
I might have been able to accept the slow pace if only the payoff at the end of the film was good enough or big enough. It is not. The climax is brief and hardly worth the effort to sit through. And then, after the climax, tacked on like a necessity and feeling completely contrived, comes the trick ending.
Of the cast, only Samuel L. Jackson comes across well. His character is the most interesting and offers the few glimpses of humor that the movie shows. It may also be that the dialogue sounds better from him, because as a comic book collector, it is more natural that he talk like a comic book character. Robin Wright Penn is completely superfluous to the plot and her inclusion simply drags the pace down even more. Which is a shame for such a fine actress. Bruce Willis is in his serious mode here, but displays little of the acting range that he showed he was capable of in 12 Monkeys.
M. Night Shyamalan tries to create a style for this movie with several trick camera shots. However, most of them are so obviously put in just for their own sake that any impact they might have is lost. As writer, producer, and director of this movie, it seems that he has too much power. Someone else should have stepped in and edited this movie down. At least the pace would have been quicker.
The plot to this movie might have made an interesting hour long episode of the X-Files, but, at least with its pacing, it can not sustain itself for a full-length motion picture.
