Unbreakable (2000) Still the very best in M Night Shyamalan’s superhero triple bill
“They call me Mr. Glass at school ’cause I break like glass”
“There are 35 pages and 124 illustrations in the average comic book”
“A single issue ranges in price from $1.00 to $140,000”
“172,000 comics are sold in the U.S. every day”
“Over 62,780,000 each year”
“The average comic collector owns 3,312 comics and will spend approximately one year of his or her life reading them”
From this white on black opening crawl we fade to black and the incessant anguished cries of a baby and now the first flashback of many to come in a Philadelphia department store of 1961 and a beautifully shot if distressing scene of an exhausted mother cradling her new born baby crying continuously. Brilliantly shot by director M Night Shyamalan, he captures this opening scene and the hubbub and excitement of a newly born baby in the public setting of a department store in a flowing mix of mirrored reflection shots and close in straight to camera as a doctor quickly arrives and after asking the baby’s name, cradles the new born in an attempt to gently soothe the infant in his arms. Following a brief examination of the still anguished and loudly crying baby, he’s shocked and alarmed enough to ask the horrifying question of whether the baby was dropped post delivery as “I’ve never seen, this” and “His arms and his legs are broken” as we fade to black before returning with white on black opening credits and “UNBREAKABLE” and a final, scene closing, fade to black.
Looking weary, dog tired and resting his head on the inside window of a train we find “David Dunn” (Bruce Willis) captured by a camera angle between train seats that barely changes throughout this second scene of the film that runs alongside the continuation of the opening credits. A minor exception to the rule that follows is a shot of a young child captured upside down in the seat from where we ostensibly view David for the entirety of the scene to come and from a rolling camera that moves slowly between the head rests of the seats in front of him. After returning the smiles of the upside down child in the seat in front of him with a cocked head turn almost in imitation of the young child, David returns to resting his weary head against the window of the train as an unseen lady asks off camera if the seat next to him is free. From the camera angle in between the seats, it first frames a tattoo on the stomach of the young lady slowly taking the seat beside David before moving to the right and with David unable to take his eyes away from both the tattoo and the striking young lady now sitting beside him, he surreptitiously slips his wedding ring from his finger and into his trouser pocket.
As the train roars through the first tunnel of three in this short scene, the camera (still in the same position in the gap between seats) finds David offering the young lady a magazine left on his seat by a previous passenger but she opts for another magazine held in the rear of the seat in front of him and quickly they fall into a conversation about sports as the young lady confirms she’s an agent for an exciting new football player. David throws out a lame joke about being a synchronized swimmer although he admits to being afraid of water (a through line of the film to come and indeed the trilogy of Unbreakable superhero films 2000–2019) before the young lady asks him if he likes football. “Not really” is David’s lie in reply, and the first half truth/half lie in a film bathed in such upside down, good versus evil dynamics and after the train speeds through a second tunnel, David introduces himself with a handshake to the smiling young lady beside him and awkwardly asks her how long she’ll be in Philadelphia. Correctly believing David to be hitting on her for a date, the young lady awkwardly confirms that she’s married and soon makes her excuses to find another seat on the train as the camera now moves (still between the seats) from the now vacant seat to David slipping his wedding ring back on his finger and with a sigh of resignation and a look straight ahead, he finds the child from earlier now sitting upright and where once there was a playfulness between them, now there is not a smile to be seen.
Looking beaten and dejected once more, David resumes his position with his head resting against the window of the train and momentarily closing his eyes in search of some restful sleep before opening his eyes soon after in somewhat of an alarm as to the excessive speed of the train. The camera now zooms in between the seats on an increasingly worried David before a cutaway to an armrest of another seat shaking wildly with the speed and rhythm of the train and back to David, now in slow motion turning his head to the centre of the train, the blaring sound of the train’s horn, and…
We cut to a single car travelling through a tight suburban street and quickly to a pair of feet hanging over the top of a sofa and David’s son “Joseph Dunn” (Spencer Treat Clark) watching television with his head hanging over the edge of the bottom of the sofa and upside down. As you may have noticed by now, another continuing theme of the film is in progress, but returning to Joseph, he flicks aimlessly through the television channels (from The Jerry Springer Show to a selection of cartoons) before settling on a news channel covering the unfolding disaster of a train derailment. Shocked at the scenes of devastation playing out on the television, Joseph now sits upright on the sofa as we cut back and forth between the open mouthed stares of the young boy and the scenes of carnage on television, to Joseph now rushing to the kitchen and a post-it note on the refrigerator that declares “Dad, East Rail #177, 3.40pm”. The train, fractured and in twisted pieces on Joseph’s television screen, is his Dad’s train.
We cut for a final time in the opening 14 minutes of the film to an emergency room in a hospital and as David slowly raises himself from a gurney in the background, several largely unseen doctors attend to the bloodied wounds of another patient in the immediate foreground. Seeing that David is awake and alert, Dr Dubin (Michael Kelly) approaches him and after confirming he’s been in a serious accident and asking a raft of questions, David has one of his own in response:
“Where are the other passengers?”
Somewhat ignoring David’s question (for now), Dr Dubin is staring incredulously at him as he asks where David was sitting on the train and whether he was travelling with his family but again, David has a question of his own:
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
Dr Dubin can only deliver this unbelievable, unbreakable response as we slowly dissolve from David sitting on the hospital gurney to walking, bewildered, through the corridors of the hospital:
“Your train derailed. Some kind of malfunction. And we’ve only found two people alive so far. You, and this man. And to answer your question, there are two reasons why I’m staring at you like this. One because it seems that in a few minutes, you’ll be the only official survivor of this train wreck. And two, because you didn’t break one bone. You don’t have a scratch on you”
Walking slowly through the corridors of the hospital to muffled and gently discordant sounds, Joseph rushes into his Dad’s arms and yet, there are no smiles of relief from a father to his son or signs of love and affection or the joy of seeing a husband walk away from a train crash from a beloved wife. David is utterly devastated even in the embrace of his son and the slightest of kisses from wife “Audrey Dunn” (Robin Wright) as they otherwise stare at each other as somewhat distant strangers. Joseph takes his Dad’s hand and places it into his Mother’s, but as they begin their slow walk through the hospital corridor this intertwining of hands lasts barely a second before the family walk through the glare of the paparazzi and local media at the entrance to the hospital, and a return to the family home…
Rabbit holes eh? There you are, innocently sucking the end of your pencil pondering which film to watch next and suddenly, for no explainable reason whatsoever, Glass (2019) comes to mind, and after hating this re-watch of the now third instalment in the Unbreakable series of films I of course had to return to the far, far superior second film Split (2017) and, well, it was raining outside and we all need a superhero in our lives now and again, and so I had to return to the film that started the mini-franchise in the first place and THE film in the series. My goodness. Unbreakable is almost a quarter of a century old. This Christmas will be 25 years since I travelled to England’s second city of Birmingham just to watch a movie as my town and county had zero plans to show it until (presumably) well into the new year of 2001 and being the impatient soul that I am, I simply couldn’t wait. 25 years since I arrived at a now all too common but back then futuristic multiplex of multi screen extravagance, yet even with the seasonal holiday on the edge of England’s second largest city I found a ghost town and a cinema screen almost entirely to myself and a film I adored from first minute until last. I still do.
Why is simply explained by this being an origin story and the very best of the trilogy that has grown around it in the two decades that have followed. Glass is truly terrible and yet Split it truly brilliant. But they both quiver in the wake of the original here. Beautifully shot by cinematographer Eduardo Serra, director M Night Shyamalan deserves immense credit for interweaving so many thematic strands and so early on in the film as to engage you in the story being told and one far from the bombast of a natural superhero film. I see Unbreakable as a quiet, melancholic and contemplative film full of superhero extremes, good versus evil, hero versus supervillain, as well as their obvious flaws and myths and reasons for being. One of M Night Shyamalan’s great gifts as a screenwriter as well as director is his supreme ability of taking the ordinary and turning it into something extraordinary. Bruce Willis’ character here is anything but a superhero and even when he morphs into his cloaked and hooded alter ego avenging angel persona, whilst it’s incredibly striking and brilliantly and expertly done, he’s still a security guard at a local university football stadium. The ordinary to the extraordinary, and so brilliantly well done.
Superhero themes, colour schemes, vulnerabilities and superpowers are of course all well and good and very, very necessary, but the theme that has always struck me as the most crucial and, with the advancing of age over the past quarter of a century, a sense of poignancy, is the father and son dynamic that bleeds through this film so magnificently. From Joseph’s muffled and inaudible words as he cuddles David in the hospital corridor at the beginning of the film to his watertight cuddle of his Dad in his bed shortly after, to accompanying David to his first meeting with “Elijah Price” (Samuel L Jackson) at his art gallery, we have a father and son who are almost inseparable, and an unbreakable bond that culminates in *that* tearful scene at the breakfast table at the end of the film. They share a “heroes code”, a quest for the truth (both inner and outer) that extends throughout the trilogy and so much more that with hindsight and a dash of melancholy, hits rather close to home when contemplating my relationship with my own superhero who wasn’t even born when I traipsed all the way to Birmingham to see this film and with whom I’ve subsequently seen the latter parts of the trilogy at a cinema rather closer to home.
I could be wrong and my superhero extra sensory perception way off beam but I don’t believe Glass really does this trilogy any favours (and how I gasped with delight at *that* scene in the closing credits of Split) or maybe I just love Unbreakable too much and any film in this series had too high a bar to reach? Maybe I’ll have to watch Glass again.
But I’ll probably watch Unbreakable instead.
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.
Whilst you’re here I may as well brag about the release of my trilogy of recently self-published books. Beautiful covers eh! As the title(s) would suggest, this is my life at the movies or at least from 1980 to 2024, and in volume 1 you’ll find 80 spoiler free appraisals of movies from debut filmmakers, 91 of the very best films appraised with love and absent of spoilers from 1990–2024 in volume 2, and in volume 3 you’ll find career “specials” on Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino together with the very best of the rest and another 87 spoiler free film reviews from 2001–2024.
All available in hardback and paperback and here are some handy links:
"A Life at the Movies Vol.1" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.2" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.3" - link to Amazon