The movie failed as a movie for me in that it advanced the meandering plot about as fast a geriatric snail goes uphill (not that fast is good but UB was absurdly slow) and the ending was too cute and self indulgent by far. It was an interesting idea but the director’s story telling abilities lacked focus and coherence. I can understand how fanboys could get a lot more out of the intricacies of the plot and the ham handed pseudo-mythic subtext the director kept slowly and relentlessly hitting us over the head with but, really… it just wasn’t that effective as a good story.
I really, really dislike UNBREAKABLE. You can read my thoughts, if you care, in the thread posted above. I thought it was a failed experiment at the time. Now I just think it’s incredibly pretentious, which is why it failed. Who cares about a movie that talks the arse?
What really gets my ire is people referring to this over and over as a “comic book movie”, and the assumption that if you like one you should like the other. As if it was a validation of the entire medium. It’s really a movie trying to validate superheros, and a bad one at that. Validating superheros can kiss my ass. They weren’t that great an idea in the first place. Of course, that’s an entirely different rant.
Besides, if you want to see revisionist superheros done well, read WATCHMEN.
I love comic books. Collecting them for years until I gave them to my brother and a friend before I moved to Dallas. That said, I still hated the movie. It sucked. There are people who like comic books can’t hate the movie. A bad movie is a bad movie. It doesn’t matter what it’s based on or about.
Well I liked Unbreakable in the same way I liked Gattaca.
Why do you think it had to be an action movie. Why can’t a movie be about how people think and feel?
So you didn’t like it. Is four bucks misspent so bad?
Yes I do collect comics. I have both Dark Knight
Returns and Watchmen. I loved unbreakable. No spandex.
No mad scientist threatening the world with a death ray or
a zombie army. Yes, the pacing was slow. I thought this was largely due to Willis’ reluctance to believe that he is superhuman. It was an examination of the standard ‘I’ve got super powers! I must wear a costume and fight crime!’. The comic Star Brand did the same thing. SB gets powers from a dying alien in issue 1. As a rational human being in a world where superheroes are only fiction, it takes him quite a while to put on a bodysuit and fight crime.
Batman has the Joker etc. The X-men have Magneto,etc. They live in worlds populated by super humans. Willis’ lives in what is mostly the real world. He has no super villians to fight. In the real world, no mask or dishuise will last. Supes takes off Clarks’ glasses and no one recognizes him?! No one has ever compared Batman’s eyes and chin to photos of likely suspects (Actually, Silver St cloud did exactly that. She decided to leave Gotham shortly after deducing Bats’ identity. No villian has ever hit upon this strategy however.)? Unbreakable was based on the question: what would a superhero do in the real world? What if you changed nothing but that man-no medals from the cops, no Bat-Signal, no Fortress of Solitude or Hall of Justice?
If you did like Unbreakable, I recommend the Silent Invasion series. It's a blend of SF, hard bolied detective, and film noir. In the first half of the series, flying saucers appear about three times. There's a wonderful mood of hidden conspiracies, paranoia, and the question of the protagonists sanity.Y’all = you. All y’all = all of you.
Also, to the OP, I though Proof of Life was pretty good. Haven’t seen UB, though.
I dunno, I liked Unbreakable in that “Hollywood movies all suck anyway, why not endure this and suck out any entertainment possible at the same time” kind of way.
Proof of Life put me to sleep in twenty minutes, however. Did I miss anything?
— G. Raevn
My boyfriend and I went to see Unbreakable when it first came out in the movies. The only good part was when the guy fell down the stairs. Crack! Ok, maybe not a “good” part. It’s actually the only scene I really remember. We talked during the whole movie…and so did every one else in the theater. The movie was such a waste of money.
I actually liked it. It wasn’t great or anything though.
One thing about it: I liked it better the next day after thinking about it a bit. I thought it was a really good exploration of how a superhero and villan could happen in the real world. I can’t think of another movie that really tried that. All the others are either cartoony like Dick Tracy or all action like X-Men. Not that there’s anything wrong with those two movies…
You’re fretting $4 on a movie when you wasted over $300 on the PS2?
What a crummy movie that was. I paid good money to see both of those movies in the theatre, but I really, really regretted the money I spent on Proof of Life.
What about Mystery Men? RAGE!!! 
Bad enough that I can’t even remember what that movie was about, or anything else about it other than the name…
I’m pretty sure I could break it.
I’m not ripped or anything, but DVDs just aren’t that tough. They may talk big, and may pretend to flex with a little shear force, but add a little more and they fall to pieces.
Oh, what?
Nevermind.
I spent $450 CDN on it. Worth every penny. A true “home entertainment box”. And yes, that movie sucked so bad I am mad that I voluntarily handed over my hard earned money for to watch that dripping excrement of a “movie”.
Quick Synopsis of movie:
First 1-1/2 hours (approx): Protagonist slowly learns he is unique
Next 5-10 minutes (approx): Uses special “powers” to do good
Next 5-10 minutes (then end): The Weird and spooky ending (don’t get your hopes up, it wasn’t that good. It certainly isn’t nearly enough to save the film)
The scary part is, I am not even really exaggerating here.
Have I successfully conveyed the feeling I didn’t like this show?
::bump::
Now that I’ve seen the movie, I have an opinion on it. It was ok. It…lacked development, yeah, that was the problem with it. It was basically the skeleton to what could have been a really good movie. If there was a book (is there?) I’m sure that it, the book, would be better, because it had that “adaptation” feel to it- pieces were missing that could have made it better. I’m not a big comic book fan, though being the older sibling of one has caused me to read more of them than I would of otherwise, but I don’t think it was a worse movie than X-Men; X-Men seemed to be similarly lacking in details and I didn’t like what they did with Rouge’s age, sort of combining her character with Jubaliee who wasn’t in the movie at all. At least they were better than Mystery Men.
Well in one of the DVD extras, I remember the director talking about how Unbreakable was actually written as a long single part of a traditional three part story. It lacks development because its technically what would normally be 30 mins of discovery and development stretched to about 2 hours. I think its a flimsy excuse for a slow movie but thats just me.
Well, after reading the past couple posts and thinking about the movie again since its been several weeks, I rethought my OP on the subject.
I came to the same conclusion. It was a bonafide waste of 75 cents of plastic. What a piece of shit. M. Shamalamadingdong (thanks snooopy) should be put in permanent purgatory for making it.
You know, the more I think about it the more I don’t dislike the movie. I don’t actively like it, but my distaste for it has waned. If a sequel is made, and if that sequel meshes well with and builds upon what was in the original, I could see the original in a much better light. And if a third is made that brings everything together from the first two movies beautifully, I could imagine forgiving the original movie totally.
I somehow doubt that will happen though.
I loved the concept. Samuel L. Jackson was great.
The problem was Bruce Willis(or at least how he was directed). I kept waiting for signs of life from this guy, or thinking maybe he took a serious blow to the head in the train-wreck. No one in that situation would be that, well, slow. Christ, he didn’t smile at all till the second half.