Unbreakable

I love a movie that starts with a bang. Too bad the bang at the beginning of Unbreakable happens offscreen. This could have been a great scene, and is typical of the kind of special effects skimping that kept this excellent movie from true greatness. And I really don't see why they couldn't at least show us the hero's real costume.

Don't get me wrong. You've got to see this movie, if only so you'll know what's going on when the sequels come out. Sources on the Net are promising some interesting developments, including a more physically powerful foe and the return of Mister Glass.

But for now we'll just have to enjoy the origin issue. Hopefully this will raise enough money for a more powerful sequel.

Ed Phillips's Review:

This SUCKS!!! Who the hell wrote this?! I am not enjoy this movie! Don't go see this!!! How come movies with comics only talk about the sucky old super-spandex stuff. There is so much cool shit in indiependet comix. Monkey Puppet rules!!! Super-heroes are lame-ass kid stuff.

Calvin Schultz's Review:

This movie is about a man (David Dunn) who finds that he has a special gift, and about how he chooses to use that gift. In an interesting prelude, Dunn, a married man, is seen on a train flirting with another woman just prior to a terrible crash. Surviving the wreck, he is given a second chance and spends most of the movie finding out why. A lot of people had to die for David Dunn to learn his lesson, though.

Of course, the filmmakers gloss over Dunn's moral failures in favor of yet another swim in Hollywood's ambiguous ethical soup. It's okay to break the laws of God and man, the movie seems to say, as long as you're a nice person and you're "finding yourself." Like other liberal filmmakers, Shyamalan goes out of his way to trumpet the glories of a godless "elite" protecting us from our own "foolishness."

I cannot in good conscience recommend this movie.

Thomas Williams-Martin's Review:

Unbreakable is a movie about the conflict between good and evil. While it is entertaining on the surface, I find the choice of symbols to be alarming. On the good side, David Dunn: white, middle class, and heterosexual. This by itself could be excused, until we look at the movie's portrayal of evil: a person of color who is differently abled and grew up poor.

Any entertainment value Unbreakable may have is ruined by this dangerous lack of social responsiblity. Approach this movie with extreme caution.

Carolyn Maccabee's Review:

The film begins with a train wreck. Make what you will of that. We then discover that one David Dunn is the only survivor, and that he is completely unharmed. He is approached afterward by a man who (working alone, if you can buy that) has developed, "a rather unbelievable theory." The rest of the story revolves around the exploration of this theory.

This movie fails at several points. First, I was flabbergasted by the hero's apparent apathy concerning the true cause of the "accident" that opens the film. He seems to accept the rather implausible "mechanical failure" explanation at face value. No one even suggests the possibility of sabotage, even though this type of operation is typical of Trilateral-15. Perhaps this was a conscious choice intended to make the rest of the movie more surprising, but I found it distracting.

I can't say too much about the film's other failures without ruining the surprises. It should suffice to say that the writer is either frighteningly uninformed about the real-world organizations that would take notice of such phenomena as his movie describes, or he expects (wants?) us to be so. In reality, Mister Dunn would be more likely to find his brain running security cameras in an All-Mart while his body is dissected at Groom Lake.

In short, the intelligent viewer will find this movie more insulting than startling.

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