Opens November 22, 2000

M. Night Shyamalan is an infinitely clever director. Not only is he able to make movies that keep the audience guessing, but he constructs them in such a way that critics will be pulling out their hair, trying to decide just how to review them. If The Sixth Sense didn't make it clear, then Shyamalan's newest film Unbreakable confirms it: This director is all about secrets. (And I'm not about to let the cat out of the proverbial bag.) Shyamalan's eagerly-anticipated Unbreakable, which many may call a copycat version of his first blockbuster, hits many of the same notes as its predecessor, but takes graver risks because it is predicated on a world that people will either love or hate.

In Unbreakable, Shyamalan sets out to create a unique universe, one with very specific rules that are embraced with lucid realism. The opening on-screen blurb about how comic books have become ingrained in our culture gives you only a brief glimpse into the unique place the writer-director intends to take us. By the end of the film, all the events that have unfolded jell in one brief and eye-opening moment, a moment that some will find illuminating and others will surely find frustrating. In retrospect, whether you like the world here or not, you can't argue with the deftness with which Shyamalan has assembled it, painting the city of Philadelphia in blacks and blues, making it look as bruised and shadowy as its unlikely hero David Dunn (Bruce Willis).

Once again, Willis proves that he's a perfect match for Shyamalan's dark sensibility. His portrayal of David is eerily restrained, offering us a man who is lost in his own world. David's sense of confusion stems from an event that would leave any one of us shaken. Mining the familiar territories of life and death once again, Shyamalan puts his hero smack in the middle of a horrendous train disaster, a disaster from which David walks away unscathed while all the other passengers died. Struggling to come to terms with the inevitable survivors' guilt, David has other issues with which to contend as well, namely a teetering marriage to Audrey (Robin Wright Penn) and a son named Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark), who desperately wants to idolize him.

But David Dunn is nobody's hero. After briefly attending the funeral for the train wreck victims, he intends to simply go back to work as a security guard at a local university. A chance note left on his car changes all that. "How many days of your life have you been sick?", asks the missive. It gets David thinking, enough so that he tracks down the man who sent the letter. That man is Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), in many ways David Dunn's polar opposite, at least when it comes to matters of the body. Where David has never been sick, Elijah suffers from a condition that leads to easily broken bones. As a child, he was hurt so frequently, the children used to call him Mr. Glass. Now, he lives a solitary existence, surrounded by the comic books that gave and continue to give him hope and define his life.

And so, Elijah has found David, a man he claims he has been searching for since he was a young man. It's David's gradual discovery of the heroic in himself coupled with the revelation of why Elijah has been looking for him all these years that offers up an ending both necessary and disappointing. Necessary because Shyamalan has set up stringent rules in this film and has followed them; indeed, he has followed them admirably, almost lyrically. Disappointing because, if anything, the reveal is almost too quick and too neat.

In the end, the success of Unbreakable will lie in how easily the viewer accepts the final revelation of this very specific world with its very specific rules. Unlike The Sixth Sense which relied on the basic identification with death and ghosts, Unbreakable journeys through what eventually emerges as a pseudo-science fiction universe in which men are heroic and evil on an almost mythic level. It is a film awash in stillness and contemplation, sometimes a bit pretentious in its artistry and philosophy but nonetheless the work of a writer/director who has no fear of taking risks and making his mark as a would-be auteur.