Unbreakable is an interesting film that explores the hidden potential that seemingly ordinary people possess. This potential can be used for good or evil, but it cannot be unleashed without the help of others.

While this appears to be a weighty intellectual premise for a movie, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan skillfully if gradually brings the viewer into the plot.

David Dunn (Bruce Willis) is a security guard and former high school football star who is battling depression. He is distant from his wife Audrey (Robin Wright Penn) and his pre-teenage son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark).

Looking for a spark in his life, he is drawn to Elijah (Samuel L. Jackson), an obsessive comic art dealer. Elijah takes an extreme interest in David, and is especially concerned with how often he has been sick or injured. Although the film takes its time getting there, the mysterious bond between David and Elijah is slowly revealed.

It's hard to believe that Bruce Willis was once best known as the loquacious and good-naturedly obnoxious co-star of Cybill Shepherd in the television show "Moonlighting." His subsequent success in the Die Hard films led to more dramatic roles. Now the former comedian sometimes appears to be sleepwalking, although a wry smile still makes an occasional appearance.

But Willis remains charismatic, and his screen presence certainly worked wonders for Shyamalan in their previous film together, The Sixth Sense. Unbreakable is something of a sequel to that film, as Willis has a similarly depressed character, and has many scenes with a child actor, in this case Clark.

While Spencer Treat Clark doesn't have the career-launching role that Haley Joel Osment had in The Sixth Sense, but his character is credible until he points a gun at his father. Shyamalan knows how to direct children, who usually overact and are overly precocious.

The two films are similar in other ways. Both have mysteries that unravel slowly, and both have satisfying surprise endings. The second time around was not as successful, however, as Unbreakable does not have as strong of a story. It was snubbed at the Academy Awards, and grossed only a fraction of the nearly $300 million that the previous film delivered.

One scene in the film doesn't seem to fit. David suspects a young Indian man to be a drug dealer, but his intuition in this instance fails him. Internet research later indicated that the Indian is none other than Shyamalan himself.

While a director's cameo often adds spice to a film, it is best done in a humorous fashion, as Hitchcock always managed to do. In Unbreakable, however, the cameo seems gratuitous, because the scene itself adds nothing to the story.

Shyamalan has since been restored to box office glory with his current movie, Signs, which I have not yet seen. He is a very good storyteller, able to flesh out characters and end a film with a bang. But Unbreakable lacks the activity and excitement that Tarantino delivered with an earlier pairing of Willis and Jackson, in Pulp Fiction. (52/100)

k@filmsgraded.com, filmsgraded.com


Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older