Susan Granger’s review of “UNBREAKABLE” (Touchstone Pictures)
On paper, it looked great. Bruce Willis, the star, and M. Night Shyamalan, the creator, of “The Sixth Sense” teaming up for another supernatural thriller. On the screen, however, it’s unintelligible and undeniably underwhelming. Bruce Willis is a Philadelphia football stadium security guard who is the sole survivor of a train wreck that killed 131 people. Why? he wonders. That question is shared by Elijah, a mysterious comic book entrepreneur who suffers from a brittle bone disease, played by Samuel L. Jackson – in an unkempt Afro – who poses not only a bizarre explanation but also theorizes a purpose for the rest of Willis’s life. “I believe comic books are our last link to a form of history,” he notes. Could, perhaps, Willis be a modern-day superhero? Willis’s wide-eyed 12 year-old son (Spencer Treat Clark, trying hard to be Haley Joel Osment) is easily convinced but not his estranged wife (a surprisingly haggard-looking Robin Wright Penn) who claims, “I don’t want violence in my life.” As for Willis, he’s just not sure of anything except that he’s sad and that his world is crumbling around him – like the slow, stalemated story which has plot loopholes large enough to drive a city bus through. During the dark, creepy, climactic chase, where does Willis, the wet, caped crusader, get dumped on a dreary, damp, rainy night? Underwater – and we’ve already been told that water is like his Kryptonite. “Do you know what the scariest thing is?” Jackson concludes during what passes for a twist ending. “To not know your place in the world. Now we know who you are and we know who I am.” On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Unbreakable” is an uncertain 3. Ostensibly about heroes and villains, basically, it’s unadulterated poppycock. Unfathomable is more like it.
