I was not aware that Unbreakable came out in the same year as X-Men. This is probably M. Night Shyamalan’s best film in his entire career. He made a name for himself with his horror film The Sixth Sense. Which is where he got his inspiration since the origin part of the superhero was interesting to him. It’s an opposite of the Marvel Comics adaptation, more grounded in its approach about a regular security guard coming to grips of his superhuman like gifts. As far as I know, it’s nowhere to be listed in any of the best superhero films list. It should be.
1. David Dunn
Bruce Willis stars as the main character of the film. Once again appearing in Shyamalan’s film, Willis plays the security guard David. We first see him boarding a train to Philadelphia. He talks to a passenger to pass the time. He notices that the train is going too fast. Within the accident, he is the only survivor with no scars or damages.
He is contacted by the reclusive comic art collector Elijah Price. Price asks him a series of questions about how he survived a horrific crash. It gets personal when he asks Dunn if he ever got sick. Dunn learns from him that the recluse suffers from brittle bone disease. When we start the film, Elijah’s mom had bought him some comic books for him to go outside.
David is an interesting character. His relationship with his wife Audrey is near tatters, due to the couple being involved in a car crash. They have a son Joseph who admires his dad. After meeting with Elijah on if something is extraordinary about David, both father and son test David’s strength. He can lift almost all the available weights including paint cans they had lying around.
What makes him great in the story perspective is that he doesn’t want to be the hero. Not that he’s ungrateful, but he can’t come to grips that he has a gift. We see when he goes through his old collection of articles, he quit football because of the same car crash. He’s afraid to embrace what he’s supposed to do. Whenever Elijah talks to him, he wants the security guard to be the hero.
The best scene is when the family is slowly coming together, his son Joseph brings out David’s gun to test if he’s bullet proof. Unbreakable is a thriller for a reason. And it’s just crazy seeing his son holding and aiming the gun to his dad to see if he’s strong. There’s tension, even David telling and raising his voice to his son to put down the colt pistol. It goes with the theme of predestination. Think of it as something that has to or will happen. David is born with a gift to help and protect people. Although, he tries to live his life believing he is normal.
2. Imitating Comics
This is probably the first movie to really have a deep philosophical angle to comic books. With Elijah being a curator of the medium, he has deep respect for it. So much so that when a customer wants to buy an original work, Price is offended when the customer wants to buy the artwork for his son. Another thing is that most comic book characters have names that are alliterative. Hence the main character's name David Dunn.
What M. Night has done so well is mirroring just how a comic book operates. When you watch the film, you see that there are so much long takes of dialogue. What a long take is when the camera keeps rolling unless there’s a cut of another angle of the moment we are seeing. For instance, when David and Audrey are having a date, the camera slowly zooms in on them. I like that scene since she basically tells him that the accident they had shows that he has a gift that David shouldn’t waste, but to use it.
3. The Trilogy You Didn’t Know
So, this part was a real shocker for me. Apparently, M. Night had planned this film to be part of a trilogy. 17 years after the film came out, Shyamalan released the film Split. I haven’t had a chance to see it, probably will on October. Though, I’ve heard it’s good since it’s a stand-alone film. Ultimately, it cultivated with the third film, I’m not naming it since it’s a giveaway with the twist. One thing I think was smart on Disney’s side was that they marketed Unbreakable as a supernatural thriller than what Shyamalan had in mind.
4. Overall
Unbreakable is one of the best films that I’ve seen to be released in 2000. For being 21 years old, it’s still good. Obviously, the superhero genre has changed significantly throughout the 2000s and 2010s, this film has a very grounded and nuanced approach of making a superhero film. Also, I was not expecting the twist.
Unbreakable gets a four out of five.
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