When I first watched "Unbreakable", upon its release in theaters in the year 2000, I thought it was a boring and overrated film. Now that I watched it again in 2020, I still think it is a boring and overrated film, but at least now I can easily bring myself to write a handful of positive comments about it as well. Quite a lot of things can change in 20 years' time, that's certain. For starters, M. Night Shyamalan hasn't made anything but rubbish after "Unbreakable", and continued to do so until the fairly successful "Split" in 2016, so it's a lot easier to label this one as of his finest accomplishments. More importantly, over the course of two decades, the film grew out to become somewhat of a unique trendsetter and simultaneously a type of underdog in its own sub-genre. Whether or not he intended for it to be one, "Unbreakable" sort of is a superhero movie. There have been dozens (far too many, in fact) superhero movies in the past twenty years, but in 2000 the concept was still fairly unique, especially considering the protagonist in "Unbreakable" - David Dunn - is a reluctant and highly atypical kind of superhero.
Yours truly keeps on nagging that M. Night Shyamalan stole the basic concept for this film from the relatively obscure horror gems "The Survivor" and "Sole Survivor". True, both films came first with the idea of one single person walking away unharmed from a major disaster that killed hundreds of people, but "Unbreakable" admittedly is quite original in terms of linking it to superhero powers. After he miraculous survived a train accident that killed all other 300 passengers, Philadelphia security agent David Dunn is stalked and harassed by gallery owner and comic book fanatic Elijah Price. For you see, ever since birth, Price suffers from a physical condition that makes his bones extremely breakable, and he developed a theory that David Dunn must be his counterpart at the other side of the spectrum; - namely someone unbreakable. Why is this interesting? To be entirely honest, I still don't know, and this immediately leads us to what is still the bottom line: "Unbreakable" is a mainly boring and uninvolving film. The ideas are good and the integer performances (notably from Willis and Wright-Penn) are solid, but the slow pacing is intolerable and the "big revelation" at the end is quite "meh".
Yours truly keeps on nagging that M. Night Shyamalan stole the basic concept for this film from the relatively obscure horror gems "The Survivor" and "Sole Survivor". True, both films came first with the idea of one single person walking away unharmed from a major disaster that killed hundreds of people, but "Unbreakable" admittedly is quite original in terms of linking it to superhero powers. After he miraculous survived a train accident that killed all other 300 passengers, Philadelphia security agent David Dunn is stalked and harassed by gallery owner and comic book fanatic Elijah Price. For you see, ever since birth, Price suffers from a physical condition that makes his bones extremely breakable, and he developed a theory that David Dunn must be his counterpart at the other side of the spectrum; - namely someone unbreakable. Why is this interesting? To be entirely honest, I still don't know, and this immediately leads us to what is still the bottom line: "Unbreakable" is a mainly boring and uninvolving film. The ideas are good and the integer performances (notably from Willis and Wright-Penn) are solid, but the slow pacing is intolerable and the "big revelation" at the end is quite "meh".