. Night Shyamalan's eagerly awaited follow-up to The Sixth Sense again finds him working with Bruce Willis in a story where things aren't always as they seem. Willis plays David Dunn, a security guard at a college football stadium in Philadelphia, whose life is turned upside down when he's the sole survivor of a nightmarish train wreck. When David walks away unharmed from the carnage, he draws the attention of Elijah Price (Jackson), the owner of a comic art gallery, who suffers from a rare condition that makes his bones extremely brittle.
Price believes that, just as he is extremely fragile, there must be someone out there, as he puts it, "at the opposite end of the spectrum." Someone who cannot be harmed. He's been searching for this person for years, and thinks he's finally found him in David.
David does his best to resist this idea. His marriage to his college sweetheart, Audrey (Penn), is falling apart because the couple have simply lost their way, and their son Joseph (Clark) is breaking down under the effects. David has enough on his mind without dealing with Price's obsession. But Price doggedly invades David's world, and Joseph, as a way of dealing with the bleak family life around him, clings to the idea that his dad's really a superhero. Gradually they break down the shell of denial David has built up around himself. David is forced to accept the hunches he sometimes gets, and the fact that there doesn't seem to be any limit to the weight he can lift. He realizes he's never been sick, and re-examines his memories of the injury that ended his promising college football career.
With Price's guidance, David comes to understand who and what he is. And once he's back on track, his relationships with his wife and son begin to repair themselves. But once David has come to grips with his nature, he needs to be true to it, and his destiny is to place himself in danger as he protects the innocent from terrifying evil.
Disney doesn't use common Sense
After he exploded on the scene with The Sixth Sense, audiences were left wondering whether M. Night Shyamalan could do it again. While Unbreakable doesn't quite rise to the level of his previous film, that's a high bar to clear. Unbreakable is a very impressive movie that proves Shyamalan's no one-hit wonder.
Since Unbreakable is steeped in comic-book lore, the writer/director was chided by some for wasting his talents on an infantile story. It's a silly criticism. Unbreakable deals with the hero archetype, and recognizes that comics address the same material. But Unbreakable is gritty and sophisticated in its examination of what it means to be anointed by destiny and set above normal people. It's no Batman.
However, while Unbreakable is a straight "A" movie, this DVD presentation drags down its grade. The Disney empire took a while to really "get" the DVD format, and has a reputation for skimping on extras. This release is part of Buena Vista's "Vista Series," a two-disc, slipcased collection with complicated packaging, mini-booklet and two supposedly "collectible" character illustrations. At least Disney has certainly learned to embrace DVD as blustery, "special edition" marketing tool.
The extras on the second disc are a mixed bag. The obligatory making-of documentary and deleted scenes are well done, and Unbreakable continues the charming tradition of including an excerpt from one of Shyamalan's teen-age home movies. However, a documentary on comics seems bolted on, and the parallel storyboard presentation of one sequence isn't nearly as cutting-edge as Buena Vista seems to think.
The most glaring shortcoming, though, is the astonishing lack of a commentary track, also a flaw of Buena Vista's The Sixth Sense DVD. Perhaps more than any filmmaker working today, Shyamalan fills his movies with complex codes. Everything on the screen means something, from lighting styles to the color of a character's clothes. Shyamalan discusses some of this in the featurettes. But how great would it be to actually watch the film with him and learn how it's all put together? The idea seems obvious, and it's frustrating that Disney keeps missing it.
All in all, Unbreakable is definitely worth viewers' time, but the chrome-encrusted "Vista series" presentation could still bear some improvement.
