Movie review of Unbreakable (2000)- by Chris Stuckmann

Full text transcript of the movie review of Unbreakable:

Welcome back to my M. Night Shyamalan series, guys, I’m reviewing a select few of his films leading up to his next film, The Visit this September. I’ve already covered The Sixth Sense. If you want to check that out, it’s on my channel right now.

His next film is My Answer. Whenever someone says, hey, Chris, what’s a really underrated movie? Unbreakable when you have a hit as big as the Sixth Sense, I’m talking critics loved it.

Audiences loved it. The Academy Awards loved it. It’s really hard to go anywhere but down after that because you are always going to be living up to a certain expectation coming off that success with another original movie that’s extremely hard to market. Unbreakable never really found its audience in the early 2000s. However, if you ask people nowadays what their favorite M. Night Shyamalan film is, a surprising amount of people respond with Unbreakable No as a warning similar to my review of The Sixth Sense. This review is going to contain some spoilers. I’ve warned you. Unbreakable is about a man named David Dunne, played by Bruce Willis. He was involved in a very unfortunate train accident and he was the only survivor. But not only was he the only survivor, he emerged without a single scratch. And this makes Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Elijah Prince, extremely skeptical because he’s been searching for a man like this for almost his entire life. Elijah suffers from a rare disease in which his bones can easily be broken. His arms and legs were broken right out of the womb. That’s disturbing as hell. But it was a very chilling opening scene and a great way to set the serious tone of what is actually a superhero movie in hiding. And Elijah believes that there’s someone on the opposite end of his spectrum, someone who can’t be hurt, someone who’s impervious to pain, someone who is technically a superhero. Now, Unbreakable came out in the year 2000, a very important year for comic book movies, because up until then, we had the Superman films, we’d had the Batman films, but they were in this sort of weird like we can do these guys because they’re popular and we’ll see what we can do.

You know, like people weren’t like, oh, my God, comic book movies can happen. I spent my childhood wondering if we’d ever see an Incredible Hulk film. We would ever see a Spider-Man film if we’d ever see an X-Men film, which is what happened in the year 2000 when Bryan Singer so excellently brought the X-Men to life. But as you guys know today, comic book movies are everywhere. They’re the most popular genre in film right now in regards to box office gross. And a movie like Unbreakable is the kind of movie that a really smart director would make today. In the year 2015, critics would go and see it and go, Wow, what a breath of fresh air from the everyday comic book movie to see this serious take on the genre. Except it was made 15 years ago before the explosion happened, which makes it all the better. Now, as you guys saw in my review of The Sixth Sense, I love that movie. And this may be an unpopular opinion, but I like unbreakable even more. I think it’s a better film in almost every way. I think it’s better acted. I think it’s better directed. I think that as a story, it’s infinitely more interesting and even more original than the Sixth Sense was, because The Sixth Sense has great ideas and it’s a very effective movie with terrific virtually everything but I found unbreakable to be an infinitely more watchable movie with far more replay value.

So let’s analyze this thing. After the opening credits, we get this incredible one take on a train with Willis and you learn so much about him instantly. You see him take off his wedding ring as a cute girl approaches. You hear him talking about his fear of water. You learn almost every major point you need to know about David. Done in one take as a self professed comic book fan, Shyamalan looked at these characters, the hero and the eventual villain, which was revealed in The Twist, which we’ll talk more about later. And he gave them both signature colors. Elegies is purple in his office. The walls are painted purple. Most of the clothes he wears throughout the movie have purple involved in some way. David Dunn’s character is green. The security poncho that he wears when he’s at his job at the university stadium as a shade of green. Quite often the clothes that he is wearing is a shade of green, as well as the way his house is directed. These subtle things have virtually no effect on this story. But what I really appreciate about it is that it shows that Shyamalan was really, really trying with this movie. I mean, he put so many small details that have virtually no impact on how the story plays out.

But he did it as a way to tribute comic book characters. In fact, a lot of the shots in the movie were designed to look as if they were comic panels. I was watching the documentary making of the film, and Willis was talking about how quite often they would just do everything in one take and he would only do it a couple of times. And it was actually making people nervous because they were afraid they weren’t getting enough coverage. But when you watched the movie and you see these long takes playing out, it reminds me of that old fashioned style of filmmaking in which a take would show many actors are just a couple of actors in a shot conversing with one another. And you can see these actors are actually acting in a space. It’s not just cut to a close up, cut to a close up, cut to a close them. It’s one big shot in which you can actually get a feel for the world. And Unbreakable did that beautifully. Now, from a dramatic perspective, I honestly think this is the best work that Bruce Willis has ever done. He is magnificent in this movie. He’s so subtle. He’s very subdued. He’s quiet. But you can feel a world of pain for things that happened to him in his past with this accident in which he was supposedly injured and then quit football.

He feels he hasn’t been a good father to his son, played by Spencer Treat Clair. Who’s also really good in the movie, another very good child performance. Let’s talk about Samuel L. Jackson, who looks like a crazy person and he is a crazy person. So it works again. We’ll talk about that twist soon. But as a character, Elijah Prince is a fascinating individual. He has this rare disease that does exist in real life. And so you automatically feel very sorry for him. But the way Samuel L. Jackson plays this character, he’s so stubborn about his beliefs and he’s so strong as a character because of all the things he’s been through that you actually begin to respect him. I want to talk about what is perhaps my favorite scene in this movie. It’s the workout scene in his basement. David Dunn is working out and his son is secretly adding more weight, trying to see if his father is really the superhero that Elijah thinks he is. And as the scene progresses, they continue to add more and more weight and it just gets funnier and funnier. And the editing of this scene really makes the comedy pop. And it’s one of the best scenes in the whole movie. As the film progresses and David realizes that he can’t remember ever being sick, he’s stronger than he ever was. He survived this crazy train wreck. He begins to think that maybe Elijah is actually right. Maybe he is a superhero.

And I’m not laughing when I’m watching this. There’s no laughing like on paper.

It’s like this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever read, especially in the year 2000 when he was trying to sell this movie. But they made it because of the success of The Sixth Sense. And my God, like 15 years later, this movie has held up so well. The marketing of the movie was like, it’s a supernatural movie. It’s a suspense, scary film. Something’s weird happened with this guy, who knows? But the movie was really about Superman in hiding. In fact, one of my all time favorite directors, Quentin Tarantino, said that Unbreakable was not only one of the masterpieces of our time, but what it should have been marketed as was what if Superman was on Earth and he didn’t know he was Superman? And that is a great idea, because that’s really what this movie is about. It’s about someone who has some secret inside of him that he is feeling like something has to happen with my life. Why don’t I feel happy? It’s because he’s not doing what he’s meant to do and what he’s meant to do is be a fucking superhero. Now, I’ve got to talk about James Newton Howard. Holy shit. The scene in which he’s going after the Orange Man, the man who killed this person and is now keeping these girls chained up somewhere and he falls into the pool and gets caught in that tarp and then starts to drown because, of course, he realizes his weakness is water. Water is his kryptonite. And when the girls pull him out and he stands up that frickin scar, oh, my God, I just want to take my fist and pump it into the air. And when he headlocks the guy and they start having this struggle and it’s like this one take rising up into the air of him, just like taking this guy down to the ground. And the music is so fucking inspirational.

You just feel like, yes, this is the first time this guy is doing what he’s supposed to do. He is saving these girls. He does feel it. That score is so good. I’m telling you guys that moment in film is one of the most inspirational things I’ve ever seen in a movie. And it’s a guy getting choked out, like, how crazy is that? But it’s true because you realize this is what the character is meant to do.

He’s meant to save people. He’s meant to be that one person on Earth who can actually make a difference. And James Newton Howard’s score, combined with the editing and the directing and the performances and the stunt work in that scene, it’s one of my favorite movie scenes of all time. And I love the fact that his security cloak eventually becomes his superhero costume. So let’s talk about the twist ending of Unbreakable, because for some people it makes or breaks the film. I think it’s fantastic and not just because of what it means for the story. The thing that most people talk about in the Sixth Sense was the twist, and that’s what got more people to go back and see it again, to see the film in a different way. It’s what gave the film word of mouth. So when you go to a film like Unbreakable, people suddenly have these expectations. In fact, I’m actually very disheartened by the Rotten Tomatoes consensus of this film with a weaker ending. Unbreakable is not as good as the Sixth Sense. The reason this kind of hurts me a little bit is because as a critic, I try to never fall into the whole Hollywood hype expectations thing. And it disheartens me that critics at the time in the year 2000 did that. It’s like we just wanted to see what the twist was and oh, it wasn’t as surprising as a sixth sense.

Well, this movie isn’t as good as a sixth sense, so it’s just not as good because the twist isn’t as good. It’s a completely different movie in every way. To compare it to this Sixth Sense is so fucking dumb just because it’s made by the same director. You don’t compare completely different films and say one of them isn’t as good simply because the ending wasn’t as good as the last one was. Eliza says at the end of this movie is that you can always tell who the villain is going to be because he’s the exact opposite of the hero and sometimes their friends like in Unbreakable the ending of unbreakable works on almost every level. Once you discover that Elijah was the one who is setting up various disasters, one of the biggest complaints I’ve heard about the ending is that it feels a little unnecessary, which I can understand because it doesn’t necessarily feel warranted or earned on the first viewing. Because it feels totally out of left field, but when you watch the movie multiple times and you see hints that Alija being the person who’s behind all of this, it really fits together very nicely. Also, the movie needs a villain and that villain is eventually revealed to be Alija. Now, look at most comic book superheroes.

It’s a very common trend in comic books. The villain is almost always directly involved with the creation of the superhero. And Unbreakable tells the same story. It’s fucking genius, guys. Unbreakable is one of my all time favorite movies. I actually like it more than The Sixth Sense. I think that over time that film is actually quietly improved. It’s gotten better with repeat viewings and I got to give Unbreakable and a plus. If you’ve never seen this movie, first off, why did you watch this review, it’s all spoiler, but anyway, definitely check out Unbreakable. It’s a great film. I think it’s very underrated and very overlooked. My next M. Night Shyamalan review is not going to be Signe’s because I’ve already done like a 30 minute in-depth analysis of science. I have nothing else to say about it. That videos on my channel right now, if you want to check it out, it’s called Signe’s Analyzed. My next review is going to be for The Village, which is a very polarizing Shyamalan film. And I’m excited to talk to you guys about it because that was one of my most anticipated movies of all time back in the day. Guys, thank you so much, as always, for watching. I greatly appreciate it. And as always, if you like this, you can click right here and get stuck. Minimized.