The other day I was visiting my folks for Thanksgiving and the subject of movies came up in a conversation with my sister, her husband, and my brother. We all enjoy watching movies and had heard that the new movie by the director of the Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan, Unbreakable was playing in the local theater. So we decided to check it out the next day.
When we arrived at the theater, we discovered that the show we had wanted to see had been sold out and so we checked out the next show that started about twenty minutes later. This gave us some time to wait and we got some pretty decent seats... or so we thought. As it turned out, my brother and I were seated in front of one of the more annoying types of people to be seated by, that of the know-it-all. This guy made semi-non sequitur comments throughout the show (such as "He isn't wearing his suit now!" or "The camera is too close to their faces!") throughout the show and then as we were walking out, he exclaimed loudly to the people eagerly waiting in line "This show sucks!" Not proper movie behavior by the way.
Anyhow, I didn't really know much about the movie going into it aside from what I had heard in a few reviews on Epinions. I don't manage to see many trailers because I don't watch a whole lot of television and at the campus theater we generally show trailers from older films. So I entered the show with only a vague idea of what the movie was going to be about.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that a big theme of the movie was the comic book. While I haven't bought a comic in about five years, I have a pretty large comic book collection and a great love of the medium. The movie explores certain traits of comic books with a few interesting twists.
David Dunn (Bruce Willis) is a man that is the sole survivor of a horrible train crash. He wakes up in a hospital totally unharmed after the fact with fuzzy memories and no real idea of why he survived.
A little while after the crash, David receives a strange message asking him if he ever remembers being sick. The message directs him to a gallery specializing in comic book art run by Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), a man who is tortured by a disease that makes his bones very susceptible to fractures. Price is very interested in how David survived the crash and poses some interesting questions to David such as 'Have you ever been injured in the past?' David has no answers for these questions and begins to search for the truth of why he survived the crash.
This movie has one of the slowest paces that I have ever seen in a film. On one hand this is pretty interesting but in parts I felt that it caused the movie to drag almost unbearably. The pace is deliberate and methodical but I am not sure that it couldn't have been altered a bit to keep me a bit more involved.
Personally my impression was that M. Night was probably trying to structure his cinematography as if the movie was a three-dimensional comic book. At the start of the film, Jackson's character analyzes a classic comic proof in some detail, noting the how the character's were drawn in great realism. The cinematography and pacing of the movie seemed much like the pictures in a comic book. You could take easily translate this film into a series of separate pictures, each drawn with a fair amount of expertise.
This technique really does have some problems with it though. Basically the whole movie could probably fit in perhaps a comic or two (perhaps a Graphic Novel--a semi-hardcover pictorial novel).
Another problem with the presentation in semi-comic format was the fact that the movie seemed to be clashing comic genres. The film came out with a severely creepy undertone but in concept was supposed to be about a super hero. If I were to put this movie in a particular comic genre, I would pick something more like The House of Mystery, a somewhat creepy horror comic, rather than the line of super hero comics. That brand of comic focuses more on the psychological aspects of the characters than their morality. The movie did touch on some moral aspects but overall much of that line of thinking was brushed aside in favor of character psychology. The film didn't focus on stuff like how a person would feel about the other people who hadn't survived a terrible tragedy but instead on the characters themselves and their interaction with each other.
Another aspect that firmly placed this film on the psychological side was the fact that there basically wasn't any action at all. Yes there is one scene which was almost an action sequence but it just doesn't quite fit the bill in my opinion.
I thought that Bruce Willis did a decent, if somewhat detached, job in the role of David Dunn. A problem I had with the character was that I wasn't ever exactly sure what he was thinking and it seemed as if David was puzzling that out too. In his search for why he survived, he appears almost amnesiac, asking his boss and then his wife if he had ever been sick. It seems as though someone would remember if he had ever taken sick leave but perhaps you wouldn't. David's interactions with his wife and son seem extremely detached but the character is considering a divorce at the start of the film so this might be forgiven. All of the character's emotions seem fractured and incomplete, perhaps as a sort of compensation for physical toughness.
The character of Elijah Pierce was really played to the hilt by Samuel L. Jackson. You could really feel his agony at certain points in the movie when bad things happen to him and empathize with him at other points. In a lot of ways his character is an emotional opposite of Willis' character. Where David Dunn is emotionally detached, Elijah is incredibly intense. I thought that Jackson did a really nice job with the role.
As for the supporting cast, Robin Wright Penn gives a solid performance as Dunn's wife and Spencer Treat Clark who played Joseph, David's son, was so similar in appearance to Haley Joel Osment (Willis' costar in The Sixth Sense) that my sister thought that he actually was him. Personally I thought the kid didn't quite measure up...
I had a few mixed feelings about the structure of the film. In parts it was almost painfully predictable and the ending seemed a bit too abrupt. In thinking about it afterwards, it almost begs for a sequel but personally I think that any sort of sequel would be hard pressed to avoid being terribly campy.
Overall I enjoyed the movie. There were enough scenes that keyed in on my love of comic books to keep me involved even through the slower parts of the film. The slow pacing might easily turn people off of the film (I was almost turned off by this myself) and others might see it as a bit too corny in parts. I would tend to think that serious fans of comics might like this film a lot but not necessarily fans of the action-packed super hero comics.
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