Herald rating: * * *
Cast: Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Spencer Treat Clark.
Director: M. Night Shyamalan.
Rating: M (medium level violence).
Running time: 107 mins.
Screening: Village, Hoyts, Berkeley Cinemas from Thursday
Review: Russell Baillie
This is, of course, the reteaming of Bruce Willis with The Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan. And if you didn't know that, it wouldn't be hard to guess.
Willis has less hair in this one (though Jackson has more than enough for everyone), but there's a lot that plays snap with the last movie.
It, too, is set in the grim streets of Philadelphia, it's got a surprise ending, it's got a boy with three names (Spencer Treat Clark as Willis' troubled son subbing for Hayley Joel Osment) in a pivotal but smaller role and it's slow and supernaturally creepy.
Well, Willis' performance as unhappily married father-of-one David Dunn, who is the sole survivor of a spectacular train wreck, runs a fine line between zen and zombie. Yes, the film does come off second best in the comparison to its much Oscar-nominated predecessor which connected big with audiences worldwide.
This is a bit of a sophomore album, really, a film that feels like it was the script the director had languishing in a bottom drawer a couple of rewrite drafts short of being fully realised, or being able to carry an audience through to its impressively preposterous ending.
But Shyamalan, who cameos as a drug dealer in a brief encounter with Willis' sports stadium security guard, still manages to wind up the tension for much of the opening act - and do it with style, especially as the narrative dances back and forth between Dunn's trainwreck aftermath and the flashbacks to the childhood of Elijah Price (Jackson).
Born with osteogensis imperfecta, a disease that makes his bones ridiculously easy to break, Elijah is nicknamed Mr Glass at school and finds solace in the comic books his mother gives him. As an adult he becomes a comic-art dealer who, after hearing of Dunn's remarkable survival figures, contacts him and offers him a theory why he's still alive. And it may just be something to do with the good v evil aesthetics of comic books - something Shyamalan hints at early with the opening credits telling us about statistics about American comic consumption.
But, about there, it goes from intriguing to gimmick-fest and starts feeling like an extended episode of the Twilight Zone made by someone who's spent far too much time in the company of The Uncanny X-Men.
It has a score that increasingly tries to signal there's really spooky stuff about to happen any second. But, unfortunately, it's at its best early on when it's echoing its superior predecessor.
I see retread, people.
Unbreakable
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