Unbreakable
Bruce Willis is tough, but M. Night Shyamalan is downright invincible.

"I don't know what's wrong with you, honey, but it'd better not involve seeing dead people."

There is a scene in Unbreakable where Bruce Willis, clad in a cape-like raincoat, extends out his hands in a crowded train station and takes in the criminality of everyone around him. He brushes against a young man and flashes to a dark dorm room, where a drunken girl fails to see the door lock shut behind her; he moves against a young woman and sees a watch disappear from an expensive store; he approaches a middle-aged maintenance worker and sees evidence of a horror too grotesque to detail. This is the greatest moment in Unbreakable, a film that, for all its comic-style pretensions, maintains what so many other supernatural films try so ardently to avoid: a sense of humanity.

Though quite different from The Sixth Sense (and rudely dismissed by certain members of the media as identical, due to the recurrence of star Bruce Willis, a supernatural plot, and a twist ending), Unbreakable is similarly blessed with the trademark touch of M. Night Shyamalan: slow-paced, still camerawork; nuanced, subtle performances; looping, intelligent storylines with genuine suspense and honest-to-god surprise. Most of all, Unbreakable has the pathos, the empathy towards its characters and their situation that fueled The Sixth Sense's success. There have been grislier horror films this year with a far higher body count than the restrained Unbreakable, yet none of them provoked the fear or interest I had in Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson's characters of David Dunn and Elijah Price. There have been recent movies as rooted in the comic book tradition as Unbreakable -- most obviously, The X-Men -- but none so creatively established the boundaries of good and evil, and none so convincingly made the case for the comic as relevant art form for our time. In an era where films strive mightily to avoid human emotion, or portray mankind as desensitized and distant (as with The Matrix, an excellent but opposite film), Shyamalan has created a superhero who learns of his powers not by leaving reality, but by embracing it. This is a brave move by a brave filmmaker, and one that fairly sums up Shyamalan himself -- half popular traditionalist, half arty film savant, all fused by a coolly perceptive view into the darker channels of human nature that Hitchcock himself may have admired.

He knows if you've been naughty or nice: Bruce Willis in Unbreakable.

Unbreakable is the story of David Dunn (Willis), a middle-aged security guard who finds himself the sole survivor of a train wreck that killed over one hundred people. His fate attracts media attention, and he is soon visited by Elijah Price (Jackson), a comic art museum owner who was born with every bone in his body broken. Price questions Dunn, leading him to a series of revelations -- when was the last time he was sick? Why did he land in his chosen profession? What are his limits -- not only in capability, but emotional endurance? Shyamalan never takes the emerging superhero out of his daily routine, and the scenes with Dunn's estranged wife (played by Robin Wright Penn) and son (Spencer Treat Clark) are the most moving. However, Unbreakable is easily as intellectually intriguing as it is emotionally satisfying. Shyamalan has revived a dying art form -- the popular suspense thriller, the kind equally appealing to film school aesthetes and those simply in search of a good story. Like suspense aficionados Alfred Hitchcock or Stephen King, Shyamalan has equal grasp of style (he swipes camera tricks from Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch, among others) and character, allowing Bruce Willis to once again become an everyman we can believe in.

And boy, can Bruce Willis act. I'm tempted, in my total enthusiasm and shock at actually seeing a good genre film, to start drawing Hitchcock/Jimmy Stewart comparisons -- I won't, but the thought does linger after the combined effect of Unbreakable and The Sixth Sense. Lacking a precocious eleven-year-old to upstage him, Unbreakable lets Willis steal the movie with a powerful performance that's even more impressive in the scenes without dialogue (and not for the reasons you naysayers think.) Jackson is also excellent in the terrific part of Price -- a role so grand it's difficult to mar, but he's wonderful just the same.

And you thought San Diego Comic Con was a freakshow: Samuel L. Jackson as Elijah Price.

There is one heavy-handed aspect of Unbreakable I just loathed and which smacks of studio interference -- it's a style consideration that comes at the very end, and I'm not going to mention it for fear of giving something away. But overall, I've seen very few movies so ambitious and satisfying this year as Unbreakable, and there is no director I'm currently as intrigued with as Shyamalan. Finally, we have a mainstream movie ripe with intelligence; an artsy achievement which doesn't delight in the decimation of its characters. Shyamalan hasn't just made one of the best movies of the year; for two hours, at least, he gave genre back its soul.

DROOL FACTOR: As in The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan had me swooning in his brief cameo appearance. It's easy to forget that this young, creative and mighty fine-looking man was also semi-responsible for the crappy Stuart Little -- but did I mention he wrote that movie for his newborn baby? And doesn't that just make him more attractive? Sigh...

GROSS-OUT FACTOR: Nothing, really. Depressing factor, however, can get manifold.

STRONG CHICK FACTOR: Robin Wright Penn plays, ala Sixth Sense's Toni Collette, a tough, feisty but secondary female character. Still wins points with me, but I'd love to see what Shyamalan would do with a lead female protagonist. His work smacks of Hitchcock, and it would be interesting to see a Hitch-style thriller whose lead woman is more than a fascinating mystery blonde.

-- Sarah Kendzior

Unbreakable is currently playing.

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