Unbreakable (2000)

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

Shyamalan's Loving Ode to the Comic Book

Many people would claim that X-Men was the comic book movie of the year of 2000. There are certainly many reasons to support that. It was handled well and did not devolve in to camp. It took its plot seriously enough to fit the expectations of a comic book movie. It had heroes and villains with super powers, and pasts that you learned about and, perhaps, cared about. These are very good reasons to show that X-Men was a great comic book movie, but, in the year 2000, I believe it was one-upped. I claim that the comic book movie of the year 2000 was Unbreakable.

Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, Unbreakable is a loving ode to everything that a comic book is about, both inside and out. It starts out with some facts about comic books and features a character who loves comic books so much he's made a career out of collecting them. But the sneaky thing about Unbreakable is that it isn't just about comic books; it is a comic book. It has a super hero who is blessed with awesome powers. It has a diabolical villain, cultured, yet insane and cold. It is about the audience living through the origins of both hero and villain. And, best of all, it is done in the style that all comic books utilize: over-dramaticism.

The superhero who is at the cusp of discovering and developing his powers is David Dunn, played by Bruce Willis. He is born with his powers, but he doesn't know that he has any; it takes an inquiry and some persistent nagging by Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) for Dunn to start realizing that, perhaps, he is special. His odyssey of self-discovery is one that many heroes went through before him: average joe finds that he might have powers, tests them out, and then solves the dilemma of how he should use these powers. Thanks to Price, Dunn begins to realize that he is unbreakable, i.e., that his bones and body are so strong that he can not be injured. He also finds that by merely coming in to direct contact with a person, he can see, in his mind, the most evil deeds committed by that person. And, like all superheroes, he has a particular weakness: Price informs Dunn that it is water that takes his powers away. Dunn has many doubts, at first, but his doubts are wiped away when he takes his powers on a test run. This leads him to a heinous crime scene, where a man has slain a household's father and is holding the rest of the family hostage. Dunn goes to the rescue, but he is knocked into a swimming pool, which almost drowns him; water is indeed his weakness. But after he is saved by the two child captives he freed earlier, he confronts the criminal once again. The criminal assaults him again and again, but to no avail; the unbreakable one wins. The next day's newspaper has a sketch of the hero who disappeared in to the night: a hooded-and-cloaked look becomes Dunn's crime-fighting costume of choice.

The evil villain is none other than Price himself. At the very end of the movie, it becomes clear that the childhood taunt that has tormented him his whole life is the most befitting moniker of his evil persona: Mr. Glass. Mr. Glass, like many comic book villains, is twisted in his singular obsession. In his case, he wants badly to find his direct opposite. Mr. Glass is so dubbed because he breaks easily: he came out of the womb with broken bones, and a fall down the stairs can cripple him for weeks, maybe months. He is constantly in a wheelchair. Because of his strong belief in the law of comic books, he believes that there is someone out there as hard to break as he is easy to break. He finds his man in Dunn. In Price, Dunn thinks he has found a mentor, someone to guide him in his discovery of his powers. He is mostly right, except that the discovery comes at a, pun unintended (or is it?), price. Mr. Glass rigged several "accidents" in the hopes that the man he searched for for so long would survive and thus be tracked down by him; nevermind how many innocent victims die in those accidents. He hit paydirt with his last set-up: a train accident, which only Dunn survives fully intact. In his one-track-minded goal of bringing a man like Dunn to light, he has, in the most evil way, sacrificed the lives of hundreds of innocents. The best comic book villains aren't merely power-mad psychos who want to rule the world. The best ones are twisted in their logic, believing that their goal is lofty and worth any price. If you don't believe me, just ask Magneto.

The best thing about Unbreakable's presentation of a homespun comic book story is the way it seems to take itself so damn seriously. While watching the movie, you don't have any idea that your watching a comic book story. If comic books had their way, they would accomplish the same task. Comic books live in the world of dramatic overtones, serious and often high-minded dialogue, and, usually, darkness to set the mood. Unbreakable has all these, done exactly the way they should be done. Only in tv and movie depictions do comic book characters seem campy, with their spandex costumes and outrageousness. In the comic books themselves, there is practically no allusion to camp; those costumes are worn with the utmost seriousness and style. Unbreakable honors that by never letting campiness creep in; the most you could say is that Mr. Glass's unique wardrobe approaches camp. Meanwhile, Dunn's "costume" is merely a big coat with the hood pulled over his head, but by the end of the movie you know that if he were to continue his crime-fighting ways, that would be his continued look. The movie shows the events as if they were real-life events, as if they could happen in real life, with little in the way of flashiness. That touch of dramaticism is just right; it even gets full of its own seriousness at times, like some comic books do, when Price compares comic book art to Egyptian heiroglyphics! It's all a tribute to the conjecture that the stories in a comic book are meant to be taken seriously, even if they are supposed to be fun in the end.

And in the end, Unbreakable is fun. It's set up so that the viewer, at the end of the movie, will be able to get up and realize what had happened. The surprise ending isn't so much Dunn's finding out the horrible things that Price had done than it is our finding out that we had been watching a comic book! In the end, you know there could never be a Mr. Glass or an unbreakable hero, but you believed it for the movie's duration. The film does its job, and the best thing about it is realizing you had been entertained in the same way that a comic book is meant to entertain you.

This may actually be Unbreakable's biggest weakness as well. Not everyone watching the movie will be a comic book fan; heck, not everyone who's seen it will have necessarily read a comic book in his/her life. Those people won't get the joke, so to speak, and the joke will have been somewhat wasted. That's ok; comic books were meant to be able to appeal, hopefully, to anyone who reads them, and so this movie is hopeful in the same way. Thankfully, it is all the more rewarding to those who do remember the comic books, who loved to take their heroes and villains seriously, and who have always wanted to be entertained by an original superhero movie, one which isn't campy or cheesy. X-Men and Unbreakable were both able to successfully deliver in this way, but only Unbreakable makes it clear in the end how much love it has for the medium that inspired it.

Rating: 9/10

©Jeffrey Chen, Mar. 15, 2001

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