M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable opens with a birth and a number. In 1961 Philadelphia, baby Elijah Price arrives with both arms and both legs broken, the result of Type I osteogenesis imperfecta, a rare disease that makes his bones extremely fragile and prone to fracture.
Trailer, via Film at Lincoln Center.
A Train Called Eastrail 177
The film jumps to the present day. David Dunn, played by Bruce Willis, is a security guard and a former star quarterback, unhappily married, riding home to Philadelphia after a job interview in New York. His train, Eastrail 177, suddenly speeds up.
He wakes in a hospital room with no injuries. The doctors tell him he is the only survivor of the derailment. The other 131 passengers are dead.
That is the whole engine of Unbreakable: one man walks out of a wreck that killed everyone else, and the movie spends the rest of its runtime asking whether that means anything.
Elijah Price and the Theory of the Opposite
After a memorial service for the victims, David finds a note on his car. It asks how long it has been since he has been ill, and it invites him to Limited Edition, an art gallery run by the now-adult Elijah Price.
Samuel L. Jackson plays Elijah. He explains his theory of real-life superheroes: if he stands for extreme frailty, someone at the opposite extreme must be unbreakable.
David is unsettled and leaves. Later he finds he can bench press 350 pounds, well above what he expected of himself.
Joseph Dunn Believes His Father
David’s son Joseph, played by Spencer Treat Clark, idolizes his father and believes he is a superhero. David keeps saying he is ordinary.
David pushes back at Elijah with a childhood memory: he nearly drowned and came down with pneumonia. Elijah turns it around. He says this fits the common convention that superheroes have a weakness, and argues that David’s weakness is water.
David also remembers the car accident that left him unharmed, the one where he tore off the car door with his bare hands to rescue Audrey, his then-girlfriend and now his wife. He faked an injury from that crash to quit football, because Audrey hated the violence of the sport.
Are you ready for the truth?
What Shyamalan Builds and What He Withholds
Shyamalan wrote, produced and directed Unbreakable, and he organized the story to mirror a comic book’s traditional three-part structure. He settled on the origin story first, then wrote the screenplay as a speculative script with Willis already attached to star and Jackson in mind for Elijah.
Filming ran from April 2000 to July 2000. Buena Vista Pictures Distribution released the film on November 22, 2000. It runs 106 minutes.
The craft is not the problem. The score by James Newton Howard holds the mood, and the film’s aesthetics and cinematography drew praise on release. Shyamalan’s direction and screenplay did too.
What Unbreakable does better than most superhero films is refuse to hurry. It treats the discovery of a power as a slow, uncomfortable thing, not a gift. David does not want to be special. He wants to be a man with a marriage that is not working.
The Cast, and the Part That Sticks
Willis plays the stillness well. His David is a man who has spent years keeping himself small, and the film lets that read as sadness rather than blankness.
Jackson has the harder job. Elijah is a theorist, a comic book store owner, and by the end of the film something else entirely — a deranged domestic terrorist, as the character is described. Jackson plays the loneliness under the talk, and the film is better for it.
Robin Wright plays Audrey Dunn, a physical therapist. She has less to do than the premise deserves.
The film also plants things it does not explain. Shyamalan appears as a Stadium Drug Dealer, a role he would reprise in Split in 2016 and Glass in 2019. In October 2018 he confirmed a fan theory that the Five-Year-Old Boy and the Woman Walking By who bump into David outside a stadium are younger versions of Kevin Wendell Crumb and Penelope Crumb from Split, which Glass confirmed in 2019.
None of that was planned as a franchise in 2000. It reads now as a movie that left doors open without knowing it.
Where Unbreakable Lands
Time put Unbreakable at number four on its 2011 list of the top ten superhero films of all time. Quentin Tarantino included it on his list of the top 20 films. The film has a strong cult following, and many regard it as one of Shyamalan’s best and one of the best superhero films.
That reputation is earned in part and oversold in part.
The first two acts are patient and strange in the right way. The movie takes a genre built on spectacle and strips it to a man sitting in a hospital room, then a man lifting weights, then a man touching strangers at work and sensing the crimes in them. That is a real idea, and Shyamalan commits to it.
The problem is the third act’s dependence on a reveal rather than a resolution. The film’s power comes from the question, and once the question is answered, the movie has less to say than its build-up promised. The emotional weight is real. The follow-through is thinner.
Unbreakable is a good film with a great premise, and the gap between those two things is the whole story of its reputation. It is worth watching for Jackson and for the discipline of its first hour.
The Numbers
- Title: Unbreakable
- Year: 2000
- Director: M. Night Shyamalan
- Writer: M. Night Shyamalan
- Runtime: 106 minutes
- Release date: November 22, 2000
- Distributor: Buena Vista Pictures Distribution
- Cast: Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Wright
- Score: 6.2 of 10
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