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Unbreakable (Vista Series)

Unbreakable (Vista Series)

List Price: $19.99
Your Price: $14.99
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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: self-indulgent, embarassing nonsense
Review: A terrible film. Nice photography though. If you can manage to stay awake. Not worth a rental. I found myself admiring the aesthetic qualities of the bookself next to the TV. Stupid, stupid plot. Not worth watching to see how stupid the plot is. An attempt to have a surprise ending. Don't bother.

Is this a worse movie than Gladiator? Of course not, but it's not a whole lot better. Just bad in a completely different way. Hence the two stars.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Unbreakable? More like unbelievable...
Review: Or unoriginal. Take "The Sixth Sense", add "X-Men", throw in a little Jules Winnfield and this is what you get. I tried my best to concentrate through all hour and 46 minutes so that I could see another "shocking" Shyamalan twist ending. I was rewarded: it turned out to be the funniest part.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: a stylish dead end
Review: As both a writer and a director, M. Night Shyamalan is attempting to bring a whole new sensibility to American moviemaking. Unlike most filmmakers who dabble in the "horror film" genre, Shyamalan eschews sensationalism and gore in favor of understatement, subtlety and indirection, preferring that we, in the audience, be given room to conjure up our own demons rather than having the filmmaker do it for us. The characters in his films drift like somnambulists through worlds drained of sound, color and emotion - and where the fine line between the normal and the abnormal, the natural and the supernatural, the real and the surreal is vague and easily crossed.

Shymalan scored a major critical and commercial success in 1999 with "The Sixth Sense," a film so brilliantly conceived and executed that it cried out for multiple viewings - the first time to be amazed and dazzled by the sheer ingeniousness of the multileveled plotting, the second to study retroactively just how intricately each plot element fell into place, catching us unawares the first time around.

It is natural that Shyamalan should have tried to duplicate that success in his next film, using virtually the same stylistic elements and the same leading man, Bruce Willis, as he did in "The Sixth Sense." Unfortunately, "Unbreakable" fails to live up to the quality of the earlier film. For one thing, "The Sixth Sense" really WENT someplace - it built and built to an infinitely satisfying resolution. "Unbreakable," for all its admirable stylistic flourishes, simply leads us to a dead end - nay, worse, a conclusion that is absurd, undeveloped and thoroughly unsatisfying.

Shyamalan's subdued narrative and visual style needs a solid dramatic core to attach itself to. Here, however, he never finds it. Willis plays a character almost too similar to the one he portrayed in "The Sixth Sense" - a brooding, taciturn man who seems to wander through life in a perpetual emotionless fog of detachment and depression. David Dunn, a man caught in what appears to be a loveless, deteriorating marriage, is the sole survivor of a Philadelphia train wreck. Already we are alerted to "Sixth Sense" parallels, so much so that we begin to subconsciously suspect that this might indeed be a sequel of sorts to the previous film. Actually, it isn't, but rest assured there is something "not quite right" about this man, although the revelation of what it is has no where near the kick provided by the earlier work. After his miraculous escape, David is contacted by Elijah Price, played by Samuel L. Jackson, a man suffering from a strange genetic illness that causes his bones to shatter like glass and who becomes convinced that David may be his alter ego, i.e. a man immune from injury and disease. This premise, based on a built-in dichotomy (just as "The Sixth Sense" was built on the dichotomy of life and death), also tries to explore the twin dichotomies of good vs. evil and hero vs. villain, but the context in which the filmmakers launch their exploration - the world of comic books of all things - robs the film of much of its potential profundity. We just can't take Willis very seriously when he is wandering stoically around the city, clad in a hooded sweatshirt, like some sort of "super hero" on Prozac, saving innocent victims from the clutches of evildoers whose purposes he senses when he brushes up against them in crowds (the tag line for this film could well be "I see criminals").

Thus, without a decent story to tell, the film turns out to be all style and no substance. What was artistry in "The Sixth Sense" becomes artiness here. Even clever visual motifs - like showing us many images upside down first, then right side up or having only the bad guys dressed in bright colors so that they stand out against the muted grays of everyone else - become sheer artifice with no thematic purpose behind them.

"Unbreakable," for all its beauty of atmosphere and tone, leaves us bewildered, frustrated and unsatisfied. Shyamalan is definitely a talent worth nurturing. Let's hope next time he can once again find that perfect marriage between form and content that he hit upon so brilliantly in "The Sixth Sense." We need adventurous filmmakers like him around.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: it keeps getting better
Review: When I first saw this film, I was unsure of how I felt about it, but I was compelled to watch it again. Now after the third time watching it, I think I can truely say that I love it. It is a very subtle film and I think that is what makes it so great. The twist at the end is as good and as satisfying as the ones in the Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects. Like those films it is very interesting to watch the film over and over to catch all the clues to the twist. This film could have easily been traditional comic book turned movie fare, but I think the human aspect and the slow but interesting pace gave it a lot more emotional depth than you get from those films.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Half good movie, half meandering thesis
Review: It's been a while since I've seen a thriller with a more assured opening. The flashback to Elijah Price's (Samuel L. Jackson) birth. The scenes of David Dunn (Bruce Willis) on the train, trying in vain to make some human contact. And the train wreck, never shown but subtly alluded too in a way that made my heart skip a beat, that will bring both these men together. These moments are handled stylishly, but with a genuine purpose.

Director M. Night Shyamalan frames his shots wonderfully, controlling the symbolism with an iron hand and creating the tone with a painter's palette. Watch for his repeated use of the motif of things turned upside down (a comic book, a child watching TV, etc.) that, while being brutally obvious, never becomes heavy handed. And he seems to drag a wonderful performance out of Willis, an actor who usually bores me. Bruce plays a character in the midst of some depressing times, but manages to imbue him with a sense of play and willingness to go on. The film was building up a reservoir of good will; I was willing to let it meander, with a purpose, towards the twist ending that I'd heard so much about without learning of its details.

Sadly, things horribly go wrong.

Like Icarus, the film's wings melt when it tries to fly too close to the sun. Around the time David goes to meet Elijah for the first time in his art store, and Jackson lays bare the film's narrative conceit, Shyamalan ceases his attempts to make a movie, and what follows is more like a thesis paper:

"It is the purpose of this film to prove that comic books, like hieroglyphics, are an important communications tool in contemporary society, shaping our myths and defining what it means to be human."

Whatever. I didn't buy it. Maybe if I had a comic book collection of over 3,000 issues, and I'd spent over a year of my life reading through them (as the film's title card declares to be average statistics for a comics fan) I might have been able to follow the film down this precarious plane. But as things stand, I thought it was just silly.

Even though he begins the film with promise, and the idea of him as an unwilling, unknowing superhero is somewhat intriguing, Willis blows all the good will he'd built up in the film's first third. He rarely shifts out of first gear, playing all his scenes with that self-important whispered delivery he's developed over recent years. It subverts the few moments of charisma that he vainly tries to engineer, such as a dark but funny scene in his weight room, where he accidentally discovers some unusual powers. (Question: If David Dunn were truly "unbreakable", wouldn't he have been able to keep some of his hair? Just curious...)

Taking their cue from the film's star, the rest of the cast seems to have trained at the Bruce Willis School of Comatose Acting. Samuel L. Jackson is stripped of his vitality as he's saddled with a hideous fright wig and a wheelchair, not to mention of series of ludicrous monologues, that aim for philosophical but land firmly on pretentious. Robin Wright Penn is quite ridiculous as Willis' wife. She tries in vain to bring some humanity to Audrey, but is weighed down by some clunker dialogue of her own ("No shooting friends, Joseph!" she says to her son at one point, with utmost sincerity; is a laughably bad line that got funnier and funnier after dozens of times rewinding to listen to it again and again). Spencer Treat Clark as Willis and Penn's son is not up to the task of the emotional scenes he's asked to play, and his affection for his father has no basis in reality.

As for that notorious surprise ending, well, Shyamalan proves once again that he knows how to catch the audience off-guard. Only by the time the sheet was pulled back, and the mystery revealed, I found myself asking "Yeah... so what?" By that time, the movie had so lost my trust that the ending truly didn't matter. If the rest of the movie were up to par, the ending would have been a mind blower. As it is, it is just a curiosity. Waiting for this final revelation was the only thing that kept me going. If not for that final gimmick, I would have given up much earlier.

The true, hardcore comic fan may get a kick out of this flick. For the rest of us, unable or unwilling to buy into its contrived mythology, the goings will be a lot harder. I found it to be a sloppy and sub-standard piece of filmmaking, loaded with potential but unable to nurture any of it to a satisfying product.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Top Flight Flick
Review: I really like:
1) Great acting
2) Deep charactors
3) A "unique" storyline. That is, not the typical and stupid "hollywood pie" servings: action/death; extra sexual crap; predictable good-guy-barely-wins conclusion; a stupid and aggressive cop/military/CEO guy who deserves to die, and will; and other common movie formula boredoms.
4) A flick that builds and builds - might leave you a little breathless. You know you shoulda unplugged the phone, 'cause you DEFINITELY don't want any interruptions.
5) No cheesy stupid and unnecessary stuff in the flick.
6) A movie that, not knowing much about it at all, possesses you, as you leave the Dollar movie, to wildly pump the air with a fist and express your emotions unashamedly.

This is some kinda flick.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Exciting Thriller Should Have Been Longer and Explored More
Review: Filmed Just down the Block from me in Manayunk, Philadelphia! This is a solid movie which is nothing short of solid entertainment. Although the movie fell short of its true potential, and probably could have been a little longer with a few more sub-plots, Unbreakable keeps you wanting more! My only regret is that the film was not longer and had a little more 'meat' in terms of additional sub-plots. Nontheless, Unbreakable is thoroughly entertaining even though I felt I should have gotten even more out of it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: I LOVE IT!
Review: A great movie if you like a strange mystery, acting looked real life, the plot was good, comic books are cool, and with good acters, how can you beat it?

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Bruce Willis
Review: Before I watch the Unbreakable,Without any doupt I buy The all the Dvd's when the Bruce Willis in any role.But after this one I will read the all the rewiews then decide to buy or not.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Whoa!....Not a good movie!
Review: Okay, the idea was pretty cool, but whoever wrote the script sure made it a boring one. I mean, this movie is too slow. I was glad when it was finally over.

It would have made a pretty cool movie if it was written differently.


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