Unbreakable is about an Everyman (Bruce Willis) who gradually sees that he is the hero in a comic book version of his life. Like its hero, the movie marvels at what happens to him.
Everyman, a security guard for a college in Philly, survives a deadly train wreck — unharmed. Guilt-stricken and a bit bewildered, he meets a comic book collector (Samuel L. Jackson), a fragile, luckless man who knows Everyman more than Everyman knows himself.
The director, M. Night Shayamalan, specializes in what ultimately amounts to jumped-up episodes of The Twilight Zone, writ large for the silver screen. He paces the twists and turns of the plot. He puts vibe over spectacle. He can be hokey (after all, The Sixth Sense is a shaggy-dog ghost story); but in spirit he belongs to a bygone era — the golden age of fantastic fiction, when writers like Bradbury, Bloch and Matheson noshed on pepperoni sticks at their cabanas (or at Harlan Ellison’s pad).
For three reasons, Unbreakable is Shayamalan’s best film: a mostly older cast, a real depth of character, and an ending that casts an air of mystery over the proceedings. In some respects, Kick-Ass (2010, dir. Matthew Vaughn) is a similar flick. The characters grapple with themselves, crafting their personas in a world yoked to the myth of superheroes. Good or bad, these characters try to make a difference. But Kick-Ass paints a broken world in which everything is breakable. In that film, the only wonder is that some of the characters live to tell. Unbreakable goes that film one better. It says that improbabilities exist; things happen that should not. And, as knowable as it is, the human spirit is a puzzle. So, wittingly or not, we create our life’s narrative as we go, to make some sense of it all.
Unbreakable is deep.