IMHO, Unbreakable was good, but not as good as The 6th Sense. However, like RickJay said, that was one of the best movies made last year, so that is saying a lot. I also agree heartily with AETBOND417 about the cinematography. It is a great-looking, stylish movie. The cool camera angles (even in scenes like the first, when the camera is stuck in the crack between the seats) really add to the look of the movie.
SPOILER*
But how many times did The Joker escape from Arkyam Asylum? I mean, honestly, they didn’t just blow the sequal away.
That’s a suprising opinion… I mean, the guy is good, and is good at a suspensful movie, that’s for sure. But greatest director? I don’t think he could even become the greatest American director… his movies don’t have the wit or intelligence of a Woody Allen movie, or the clarity of a Scorcese, or the photography of a Kubrick, or the visual flairs of the Coen Bros, or the hipness of a Tarantino. He has one excellent note, but he plays it too much. I think if he’s expands his range, and tries not to make EVERY scene full of suspense, and works on his dialogue a bit, he’ll be an excellent director, but I don’t see anything that would make him one of the greatest directors.
Anyway, to say something relevant to the thread: Unbreakable is a great movie. But then again, I used to collect comic books. Also, Samuel L. Jackson was incredible in this movie - I loved the way he talks about comics. There’s a few logical holes in the movie, but nothing too distracting.
I heard the NPR review before I saw it, and was pleasantly surpised at how good the movie was. The reviewer for NPR Didn’t Get It. I think it kinda does Unbreakable a disservice to compare it to The Sixth Sense. It’s a comic book movie. A postmodern, realistic, spandex-less comic book movie, but still. There’s been a trend lately in the funny books to attempt to tell stories wherein people with super powers interact with the world in a believable way, with realistic repercussions (The Authority, Astro City), and Unbreakable is like the ultimate cinematic realization of that ethic, with an added layer of po-mo neatness. Along with the indirect method of having the story informed by comic book conventions, Sam Jackson’s character was also directly influenced by them, and I, for one, appreciated how well those two aspects intertwined. (Speaking of indirect, I’m having a bitch of a time avoiding specificity so as not to give away the plot, and fear I am sacrificing clarity for it.)
The cinematography, to me, was pitch-perfect. It was obviously deliberate, but it never seemed ostentatious or forced. I thought the writing and acting were pretty impressive, too. I didn’t like the captions at the end, either, but I did chuckle at the one for Samuel Jackson’s character.
SPOILER
“Institution for the criminally insane”: come on, how can you not love that?
To the folks who thought it sucked …
I noticed those of you who didn’t like it generally professed no love for comic books. This may be the source of your hatred. The beauty of the movie is that it depicted a comic book type story line, but disguised it as a legitimate psychological thriller. The goofy lines were delivered with just enough pathos to fly, but they may well have been lifted directly from Marvel.
The cool thing about the movie, or more to the point - the director - is this: just as in Sixth Sense, once you’ve seen the whole thing, you can mentally go back through the movie and look for “the signs” - foreshadowing, symbolism, etc. We went over and over this movie for an hour trying to figure it all out. Among the things we figured … (and all of this almost directly relates to comic book conventions - if you’re not at least familiar with comic books it doesn’t make much sense):
- Samual L. Jackson as the Arch-Enemy - He was Mr. Glass, in almost every scene in which he appears, the first image of him is either in a reflection or through a pane of glass.
- His comic bookish symbolical color of evil is purple (the gift wrapping - the decor in his house - his tuxedo at the end).
- The hero’s name is David Dunn. A familiar theme in comic book heroes is name alliteration - Peter Parker - Bruce Banner - Reed Richards
- Obviously, the cape.
- S. Jackson’s mother’s lines, every one of them, practically told you what was coming next “This one has a surprise ending” - “The arch-enemy fights you with his mind” - etc.
I loved this movie. Although, the captions at the end were anti-climactic, to say the least.
I was expecting to love this movie. It stars one of my most favorite actors, Samuel L. Jackson (the guy is one cool mutha-fucker :::snicker::: ), appeared to have a great story line, and had promised a surprise ending that rivaled The Sixth Sense.
Surprise ending? HA! Who didn’t figure it out 15 minutes into the movie? Don’t get me started on the stupid, hokey script. Come on, the guy never noticed that he has never been hurt or sick a day in his life until he gets a note on his windshield?
What a disappointment. 
It sucked.
I liked it, and I thought this movie was the perfect set up for sequels (of which two are planned).
Mr. Glass. Sentryman. Heh. It’s almost too perfect. And the ending was perfect comic book style.
But hopefully the next ones won’t be so sloooooooow.
Thank you Diane! I was beginning to think that maybe it was just me who didn’t like the movie. I left the movie so disappointed because I had been looking forward to it for weeks. Sixth Sense was such a good movie and I expected more from this one.
Jack Batty suggests that not liking comic books may have been the source of our dislike for the movie. While that may be true for some people, it’s not for me. I love comic books. My younger brother and I collected them for years! We made regular trips to the store and spent hours looking for issues that we were missing. I think I understand the movie and comic book connection. Still, that didn’t make the movie any better or interesting to me. I thought the movie was just bad.
I thought it was absolutely brilliant. I’ll admit, though, that I never saw The Sixth Sense (my roommate, the son-of-a-bitch, gave away the ending before I had gotten a chance to see it, and I never mustered up the enthusiasm for it afterwards), and while I’m not a comics geek, most of my friends are.
As for the “let-down” ending- I (and the people I saw it with) felt it was entirely appropriate. While much of the focus is on “David Dunn as Super Hero”, a lot more of it is on the pure mundanity of the lives involved. And SLJ’s fate was, in the end, realistic and mundane. So it was perfectly appropriate for the movie. In my humble opinon.
Whooops, make that one bad mutha-fucker.
I have to lean towards the stupid/hokey camp on this one, but I also admit that I’m one of those guys who’s attention starts to wander when nothing immediatly interesting is going on in front of me.
Part of my dislike for this movie was founded before I even saw the opening credits- I don’t care for Bruce Willis because every time I see him I automatically think of the Die Hard movies. That character of David Dunn needed to appear fragile in mind/spirit, the better to ofset his “Unbreakable” body. This would have been a good time for Shyamalan to discover some new struggling actor. I had a hard time with Bruce Willis attemptimg to portray a lightweight, uncertain and emotionally broken persona (the shaky marriage) in an unbreakable body. Jackson did a much better job in portraying the man with a fragile body but an iron will & unbreakable determination. There was much more room to develope the delicious double dichotomy there, and it didn’t happen. Boo.
But what really killed this movie for me was that I found myself having flashbacks to Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, wherein the main character played by Christopher Walken is a man frightened by an ability that he doesn’t understand & can’t control. In the end, the ability he posesses benifits the whole planet by averting nuclear winter, but it consumes him utterly. IMHO, Willis’ attemt at this same character was a mere shadow of Christopher Walken’s in TDZ. I also think that Dunn’s “sense the bad guy’s evil deed” power was a clear carbon copy ripoff of Walken’s in TDZ.
Jack Batty wrote:
I have a theory about that.
Remember how Blade Runner originally didn’t have the happy ending with the heroine being a “special” replicant with a longer lifespan? And how the studios made Ridley Scott tack the happy ending on, against his wishes?
Well, maybe they did the same thing here. Maybe the director’s cut didn’t have the text describing what-happens-next at the end, but the studio made them put it in because their moronic “test audiences” or “focus groups” were too dumb to figure it out otherwise.
Incidentally, I didn’t think the hero’s security poncho looked so much like a cape. It made Bruce Willis look more like the evil emperor from Return of the Jedi.
i thought his thing made him look more like the I Know What You Did Last Summer guy…
anyway, as cool as the cinematography was, it seemed like it was just there to be cool. it didn’t really accentuate a scene, it helped what could quite possibly have been a very boring scene become tolerable.
so anyway, yeah. i wasn’t overly fond of the movie, it just seem a little overdramatic and such. if the director weren’t so good, the story couldn’t carry the movie off. i don’t know, that is just my opinion.
Dax, who is new here and posting his first post 
I just saw it today.
I didn’t care for The Sixth Sense, really, because I saw that ending coming a mile away. I didn’t get the same impression with Unbreakable.
I loved the last scene, but not the captions.
I loved seeing Franklin Field immortalised in film.
I loved Robin Wright Penn’s performance.
The kid tried too hard to be Haley Joel Osment.
Bruce was too catatonic.
Sam was too good.
I didn’t care too much for the funky cinematography: what’s the deal with all the upside down shots? Something related to comics that I didn’t get?
And, anyway, the ultimate comic book movie is Chasing Amy. (No, I’m not a comics guy.)
WARNING! THIS POST PROBABLY CONTAINS SPOILERS!
(If you don’t want spoilers, why are you reading this thread?)
I love comics. I’ll be reading them after I die. I didn’t like Unbreakable.
It could be because my expectations were so high, but I don’t think so. I just think the whole thing was a failed experiment. (Two sequels? Please God, no.)
The beginning was awful and slow. What was with the long undisturbed shot between the chairs? Why couldn’t the director get a color palette? Why is this scene still going?
But then, a while after the crash, it began to get a little interesting. I was ready to be hooked, but the hook never came. Or it did, but the bait was unappealing.
There were a few moments in the film I liked. When Bruce Willis was walking through the stadium, first experimenting with his powers, I got the feeling of “Just what would it be like to be unbreakable?” Also the scene where the doctor is reading off Samuel L. Jackson’s injuries, I got a feel for the hell of his life. (Also, the fall on the steps was pretty brutal.) But in my opinion the whole superhero idea just didn’t work. There’s a reason people were laughing during this movie. If you want to see revisionist superheroes, read Watchmen.
But, my main gripe with the movie is that I didn’t care about any of the characters. I couldn’t muster up any real enthusiasm. It broke the movie for me. (Realize the pun, not intended.)
I’m not going to be the comic store guy and say “Worst Follow-Up Ever.” It was alright, it just wasn’t anything special. I’ll probably watch anything by M. Night Shyamalan, but I think he needs to move on.
As a last aside. . . Publicity people, if a movie is going to have a surprise ending, for God’s sake don’t tell people about it. Even if they can’t guess what the twist is, they’re going to expect it. The whole point of a surprise ending is that it’s a surprise. Stupid, stupid publicity people.
Just for the record: Unbreakable is not Shyamalan’s second film. It’s his fourth. The first two were relatively obscure, it’s only with the screenplay of The Sixth Sense did he get the notoriety to get Bruce Willis on the cast.
So, “Sophomore Slump” is really a misnomer. More like “Senioritis” if you want.
I saw this movie last week (sorry, just caught up with the thread!) and I thought it was pretty damn awesome. Not my new favorite (I think Shakespeare in Love is the best movie of all time, to give you an idea of my tastes, followed by Casablanca and Say Anything), but it kicked ass. I noticed the thing about the glass too - Mr. Glass was always shown in glass for the first shot. I’m not a comic book fan at all, but I still liked that aspect of it.
For me the best scene was in the train station, when David was starting to use his powers. How creepy was that? It was one of those liminal moments where I truly felt his life, his wonder.
The cinematography (sp?) blew me away. I loved all the angles and shades of light - it reminds me of how the different frames in comic books have different POVs - in one, the super hero is huge, in another the villian is larger than him.
And I guess I’m just clueless, but I had no idea what was coming at the end. I had no idea how The Sixth Sense would end either (I saw it opening weekend), so I guess that says something about me.
I give it a B+. Definitely worth renting, but I wouldn’t buy it.
I just saw this movie recently with my bro-in-law. He is a huge comics fan. He has some of the original X-Men comics in a safe deposit box (or something like that) somewhere. He absolutely despised this movie.
I thought it was pretty bad, but not horrible. It had some good parts too, of course.
There were several parts where I laughed out loud. I do not believe those parts were meant to be laugh-out-loud funny.
For instance, when Mr. Glass calls up Willis’ character and tells him that there is a link between them because they can both drown. Gee, I must have a link with both of them, since I’m pretty sure I can drown.
And wouldn’t you know it, the very first hero stuff he does gives a perfect opportunity for him to be pushed into a pool and have his “weakness” demonstrated firsthand.
Also, just before he gives his kid the paper during breakfast: Is it just me, or is does the movie take a break to give us a far too long message from it’s obvious sponser, Tropicana? I was this close to yelling aloud in the theatre, “When the heck did this movie turn into an orange juice commercial?”
The movie seemed to plod along going nowhere, just waiting for enough time to elapse so it could spring it’s ending (which was pretty neat, if not unexpected) on us.
I’d give it a C-.
(For the record, I’m pretty hard on movies. Take my views with a grain of movie-theatre popcorn salt. )
I saw it today, and while I didn’t think it was great, I thought it was good, better, in fact, than Sixth Sense. I honestly did not like that movie much. More to the point, I only liked it at all, retroactively. The whole time I was watching it, I kept thinking how boring and pretentious it was. It seemed to mee to be all style and no substance. Everything in the movie seemed designed to project this sense of bleakness and dispair, even at the expense of storytelling and believability. I couldn’t figure out why Bruce Willis didn’t even TRY to talk to his wife. Why he never showed any emotion besides dispair, why he never changed clothes, and why it’s never cloudy in Philadelphia. It didn’t help that a lot of horror movies and melodramas place their characters in beautiful but bleak settings that often make little sense for the characters to be in. Only at the end, did I realize that much of what I hated was deliberate. This movie, on the other hand, had just enough color and humor to make the pathos believable and interesting. I never WANTED Willis’s character in SS to be happy (except so the movie could end), because he was so morose as to be unlikable.
As far as the ending to Unbreakable goes, I thought it was somewhat weak, but only because I was expecting a Shyamalan Twist Ending(TM, patent pending), like in SS. It wasn’t, but it was perfectly logical, given the story. (Well maybe logical isn’t the right word.) I thought the whole premise was a little weak, rather, and it mostly came out at the end. I mean come on, we’ve had too many comic book movies as it is, and even the fans here have pointed out there was nothing particularly original about Shyamalan’s take, apart from his style.