"I am annoyed, yes annoyed, by Unbreakable. The ending caught me totally by surprise, yet all the clues were there for me to figure out what was coming. They were there -- I have been picking over them in my head for the last few days since I saw the film. He laid it out, all the comic-book philosophy you’d ever need to know to realize Elijah’s true purpose. And I missed it. Okay, so I am not so much annoyed by Unbreakable as I am annoyed at myself for missing the clues. But I forgive myself because Shyamalan so deftly wove the clues into his script -- without coming close to hammering us over the head with them -- that there are probably very few people who would see it coming. I don’t understand why people think the final twist is unsatisfactory. It was there all along, staring us in the face, daring us to find it. Kudos to Shyamalan for making a very good film that goes beyond the gimmickry of his previous effort." -- Chansen

 

"Unbreakable was a great postmodern take on the comic-book genre. Its deliberate pacing, muted colors, and lack of flashy spectacle all worked together to create the ultimate anticomic. In many ways, I think that X-Men (a solid film in its own right) would be the perfect companion piece to this film. However, there were a few elements of Unbreakable that I found a little distracting. For instance, I still don’t understand why the filmmakers did not use real comic books. I do understand that there would have been an additional cost, but when you spend $5 million for a script, I think you can afford a few thousand for licensing a couple of comic titles. It would have been so much more effective to have Sam Jackson talking about Superman and Spiderman instead of the made-up characters of the film. It was a little detail that took away from the ‘authenticity’ of comics as contemporary mythology. "The opening and closing title cards have got to go. Just because you tell us that there are lots of people who read comic books doesn’t mean that the audience will accept those readers as authorities. Our first image of the comic collector is that guy from The Simpsons (which needs to do a parody for next year’s Halloween special) who still lives in his parents’ basement. The director needed to trust the actors to make the case for comic books through the course of the film rather than spoon-feeding us a couple of facts to chew on. "And finally, the closing sequence -- the closing title cards reduced the film to an episode of Dragnet or Law and Order. Please Mr. Director (I don’t know how to spell your name), if you read this, give those of us with a DVD player the option of watching this film without end blurbs. It would be one of the easiest and most effective cuts made from any film." -- J. Frank

 

"Unbreakable is a lot like David Dunn’s train ride that sets up the film. It’s moving at a deliberate speed and then BAM! Crash. Slow and patient, M. Night seductively weaves his story. I was hooked from the opening credits. Like The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable is filled with creepy atmosphere and some unique shots (the back-and-forth between Willis and the agent on the train and the POV at Willis on the examining table). It’s as if the audience is watching the film through another person’s eyes. The ending fit what came before, but I was disappointed by the way M. Night slammed it home. It felt abrupt, and I left the theater thinking it ended too soon. It is nice to see a director not hitting us with ‘shock’ chills, opting instead for tone and atmosphere. But I wish he had finessed the ending as seductively as he worked the rest of the film." -- Adam Goldstein

 

 

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