Unbreakable

Ever since “The Sixth Sense” raked in a fistful of dollars and Oscar nominations, its writer and director M. Night Shyamalan must have been getting the red carpet rolled out at every studio in town. I can hardly begin to imagine the deals he must have been offered. With all that, the temptation to go to the well again must have been overpowering. But, like a kid for whom the candy store has been thrown wide open, Shyamalan eats too much of the wrong kinds of things. Lugubrious and phlegmatic to a fault, “Unbreakable” treads old ground like a seasoned bloodhound. Shyamalan doesn’t stray one iota from his previously successful formula. The star is the same (Willis); the locale is the same (Philadelphia); the color scheme is the same (gray); the pacing is the same (leaden); and the tone is the same (somber). There is even a kid star with three names (though Clark can’t hold a candle to Haley Joel Osment).

However, the new movie diverges in any number of unfortunate ways. The story is threadbare, the development weak, the dialogue uninteresting, and the surprise ending (don’t worry, I won’t give it away) is a letdown. The characters all speak in monotones that barely register above a whisper. This last was a tactic that worked well in “The Sixth Sense.” Sometimes speaking softly can focus the attention, but Shyamalan should remember that sometimes it just makes people stop listening. Despite the troubled stares that the movie offers in abundance, nobody seems to be all that interested in what’s going on, and that includes the audience. Calling the tempo of the film funereal would be to flatter it. It is positively somnambulistic. We wait, and wait, and wait, for things to pick up some steam, some energy, some... something, but they never do. You want action of some kind, some sign of life. Even a raised voice would help. Willis moves about like a zombie, Wright Penn (pretty much deglamorized for the role) does the same, and even the usually reliable Samuel L. Jackson (wearing a wig that looks like it was caught in a strong crosswind) can’t energize his scenes.

I am compelled to penalize Shyamalan in all five of the “Vital Sign” Categories, because the things that were innovative and arresting in “The Sixth Sense” are simply lethargic and annoying here. In the earlier film, he used the wintry mood as a palette against which he set off his shockers, but here we get the palette without the payoffs. There is virtually no activity to rouse us from our glazed-eye stupor, and what little there is seems like it wandered in from some other movie. Mostly the characters sit around looking depressed. (We should have predicted this from the dull preview reel.) Some of the scenes are lighted so darkly that it is hard to tell what is going on. Shyamalan is clearly gifted; he possesses a distinctive directorial style (which is a rarity in this world of graduates of the MTV school of directing), and has a unique way of framing images. He has the ability to get us to look closely at mundane objects, whether or not something unusual happens to them.

But he has become too enamored of his little tricks, like shooting scenes as reflections, or starting with the image onscreen upside-down, and then spinning it slowly rightside-up. In “Unbreakable,” you watch all this, thinking the entire time, “Come on, we’ve seen this before. Let’s get on with the story.” When a director’s technical tricks begin to overshadow his story sense, it may be time for a different approach. Shyamalan should have made a beeline for a project as far from “The Sixth Sense” as possible. Instead, he has made the worst choice he could have made: trying to catch the exact same lightning in the exact same bottle. The story, such as it is, concerns David Dunn (Willis), a drab Everyman who works as a security guard. He is drab, his life is drab. His marriage to Audrey (Wright Penn) is well on its way to drabsville. Even his adoring son Joe is drab. On his way home from work one day, David’s train crashes, killing everyone on board except him. Hmmm, amazing. He is then approached by the mysterious Elijah (gee, wasn’t he a prophet in the Bible?

Wow.) Price (Jackson), who is convinced that David has a special gift of indestructibility, and that he has been put here “for a purpose.” (Again, I am not telling you anything that is not obvious from the preview.) Or something like that. The irony of all this solemn futzing around is that David’s “powers” are never well defined, and his manner of using them even less so. Maybe Elijah Price has some idea of what all this means, but he doesn’t bother to tell those of us trapped in a dark theater with him for two hours. The movie opens in a fashion that can only be called bizarre. Namely, a series of statistics are flashed onscreen concerning the sale of comic books in America, and the buying habits of those who collect them. Well. There may be many ways to grab an audience’s attention in the opening minutes of a movie, but this is not one of them.

Yet this strange comic book theme is central to the entire picture. Price is a comic book collector, exhibitor, and dealer. It is fair to say that his entire world view is not only molded by, but defined by, comic books. In fact, his assessment of the matter surrounding David Dunn is expressly set forth by the structure and cosmology of the comic book universe. He utters any number of lengthy speeches regarding the principles of comic book character, physiognomy, and narrative, and there were a few times that I almost burst out laughing, because the way he tried to make real life fit the paradigm was so preposterous. (Sadly, these were about the only sources of mirth in the entire picture.) I am at a loss to explain what Shyamalan thought he was up to here. Has he gone mad? Is he actually a giant comic book fan, and is hard at work striking a blow for the legitimacy of the art form? Or does he actually, at some level, believe in this swill? Hard to say. The beauty of “The Sixth Sense” was that it dealt with themes universal to the human experience--death, concerns about the afterlife--and was founded upon a very strong relationship between its central characters.

In contrast, “Unbreakable” concerns themes that are of no interest whatsoever to anyone (save, perhaps, for a few geeky “Dungeons and Dragons” players): is life on earth modeled after comic books? Has David Dunn ever had a cold, and if not, why not? Furthermore, none of the connections between the characters are very convincing. Everything that worked for Shyamalan in his breakthrough picture turns against him here, but in particular let us blame his writing. It was widely reported that he spent over a year polishing the script for “The Sixth Sense.” From the look of things, he tossed off “Unbreakable” between installments of “The Silver Surfer.” Nevertheless, we shall forgive Shyamalan his slump here, and hope that with his next project he regains his form, energizes his work, and delivers the kind of film of which he is so clearly capable. (11/22/00)