Unbreakable

THE GIST: David, the lone survivor of a disastrous train wreck, is contacted by a comic-book expert known as Mr. Glass because of a genetic condition that makes his bones incredibly brittle. Mr. Glass tells David about his theory that comic books' stories are based on reality and that he believes David to be a superhero himself. David dismisses Glass's ideas, but could there be some truth to them? Is David really unbreakable?

After the smashing success of The Sixth Sense, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan was thrust on top of the world, which raised expectations for his next project sky high. When he released Unbreakable, critics and audiences alike were unimpressed, which lead to a backlash from which I think Shyamalan never fully recovered.

I remember feelings of ambivalence when I first saw this movie, but when I recently watched it again, I thought it was pretty well made and certainly original and cleverly constructed.

Furthermore, unknown to me at the time, Shyamalan envisioned this movie as part of a trilogy together with Split and Glass. All things considered, when viewed on its own merits and not through the lens of the expectations of his first hit, I think Unbreakable is not a bad movie at all.

Samuel L. Jackson is excellent, but we also get some very good work from Bruce Willis, Robin Wright, and Charlayne Woodard. Especially cool is seeing Spencer Treat Clark play David's son as a young kid here and again as a young man in Glass.

THE BOTTOM LINE: I consider myself a Shyamalan fan and like many of his films. This one is no exception, both on its own and as the first piece of a larger puzzle. Check it out!

Grade: 7.5