Forgotten Superhero Classic That Never Needed A Sequel, Stream Without Netflix
Before the MCU, before even Tobey Maguire made his cinematic debut as Spider-Man, there was M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. This superhero thriller, which eventually expanded into a wasteful trilogy, had audiences looking at comic book superheroes in new ways and reconsidering what was possible in the genre. Unbreakable is streaming now on Max, and I’d urge you not only to watch it if you never have, but as far as the resulting trilogy is concerned, to stop there.
Unbreakable
In Unbreakable, Bruce Willis plays David Dunn–a security guard who is returning home from a job interview when he winds up the sole survivor of a horrible train crash.
While contending with his swiftly deteriorating marriage, David searches for some kind of meaning in what happened to him and he finds a potential answer from Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), an eccentric art collector with a radical theory.
Elijah believes that superhero comic books are part of an overly romanticized history. Superheroes, Elijah says, are real but they are nothing like the gaudily garbed vigilantes of Justice League or Avengers comics with one exception–they have supernatural abilities and they are here to protect us.
David Tests Himself
While David’s son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark) wholeheartedly embraces Elijah’s ideas, David himself is understandably skeptical. Still he finds himself exploring the possibilities of just how “unbreakable” he is.
For example, he tests how much he can bench press, ultimately not even having enough weights to hit his own limit. He more closely examines his ability to psychically receive visions of crimes when in physical contact with the criminals in question.
Unbreakable finds David growing more confident in his connection to Elijah’s theories, only to be reminded of an incident in which he almost drowned. The memory temporarily has both David and Elijah convinced their experiments have been a waste of time, but not for long.
Imperfect, But Still Amazing
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Unbreakable is that it failed to spawn more movies like it–films that could take the ideas of superheroes in directions beyond what Marvel and DC had in store.
Unbreakable isn’t a perfect film. It moves slower not only than your average superhero movie, but your average movie, period. Considering it was Shyamalan’s first feature after the runaway hit The Sixth Sense, something tells me the director was given a little more leeway.
Still, like most of Shyamalan’s films, Unbreakable is a beautifully shot and wonderfully acted film. The premise remains novel, even after over two decades of superhero movies filling studios’ coffers.
It Never Should Have Been Part Of A Trilogy
All reports point toward the idea that while Unbreakable stars like Willis and Jackson were always hoping for sequels, Shyamalan felt ambivalent. I think it would’ve been best if the film had been kept separate from 2016’s Split, which in turn lead to the thoroughly disappointing Glass.
Both Unbreakable and Split are engaging stories on their own and did not need to be made part of the same narrative. Yes, James McAvoy’s character in Split was originally conceived as the “Orange Suit Man” David confronts and defeats toward the end of Unbreakable, but once The Horde became its own story, it should have stayed there.
As a result of Bruce Willis’ cameo at the end of Split, his hero dies an ignoble and utterly ridiculous death at the end of Glass, rendering an already bad movie completely intolerable.
Stream It Now
GFR SCORE
Regardless of the mistakes in the movies that would come later, Unbreakable survives as a unique and powerful superhero thriller. You can stream it right now on Max.
