It would appear that "recently" was the wrong adverb to use there, as was the verb "become."
I did keep my informal and unpremeditated M. Night Shyamalan weekend going last night by rewatching Unbreakable for the first time since I saw it in the theater in 2000, and I couldn't help notice about how Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) is constantly spelling out every single one of his thoughts on a) who he is, b) who Bruce Willis' David Dunn is, and c) what their relationship might be to one another.
The thing I found particularly funny about this is that in another bout of excessive explanation of their respective roles vis-a-vis comic book characters, Elijah tells us -- or is it his mother? -- how there are two sorts of villains, the one who can physically fight the hero and the one who can mentally fight him. Elijah would obviously not be a case of the former given his brittle bone density, but I'm not sure how he could even be a case of the latter given that he's always telling David exactly what he thinks and rarely committing anything that feels like a subterfuge emanating from superior intellect.
And I didn't realize until this viewing that this movie, which I'd always assumed didn't have a twist, does sort of have one when it reveals that Elijah Price was responsible for all sorts of different mass murder events in trying to find the man who was his opposite. Maybe it didn't register as a twist at the time because it seemed so dumb to me. And dumb is, again, not what Elijah Price is supposed to be.
Okay so Price (I guess I prefer a last name for a villain?) has decided that there must be someone out there who is his opposite, and he needs to find him. Fine. But I don't get why he a) has this certainty, and b) thinks that by crashing random planes and derailing random trains he will uncover this person in any reasonably short amount of time. First off, this unknown person needs to be living somewhere within his own sphere of easy access or influence, as in either the greater Philadelphia area or somewhere close by that a physically limited person can reach fairly easily. Secondly, Price has to believe that he'll be lucky enough to choose just the right plane to crash or just the right train to derail that will happen to be carrying this person at that time. The odds against this are astronomical, of course -- unless the future Mr. Glass believes that people like David Dunn are actually prevalent enough in society that if he doesn't uncover one, he'll uncover another.
The whole thing just doesn't make a lot of sense and it indicates to me that Shyamlan was in decline a lot earlier than we might have originally thought.
I do think there are some cool moments and camera tricks in Unbreakable, but I was reminded why I didn't glom onto this film at the time it came out, which is that there isn't a lot there. The plot is notably slack and there is indeed way too much talk of comic books and superheroes.
In fact I certainly had a false memory that this movie was a lot more subtle than it is. I had a memory that only finally by the end of the movie, when he tracks the janitor to the house where he's keeping two children hostage (having already killed their parents), do we even get the idea that this is a superhero origin movie. In fact, the movie has an opening text that thinks it's really profound, about comic books and how many gets sold in each year (um, who cares about that?). This movie is way more on the nose than I originally remembered.
Also, I found it a bit strange that the movie starts out being about David Dunn's imperviousness to illness and physical damage -- it's all there in the title -- but then ultimately shifts to the fact that he has extra sensory perception that helps him figure out who in the general public is committing crimes just by touching them. For one, I thought about how that same thing was already done much better in the Stephen King novel The Dead Zone and its excellent movie adaptation starring Christopher Walken. But I was also critical of how it needlessly moves off of the core thing about David that makes him interesting, which is his heretofore undiagnosed physical attributes. Sure, no superhero usually only has one thing about them that makes them distinctive, but having both an unusual physical gift and an unusual mental gift seems to be going a bit too far, and confusing the themes Shyamalan labors to unveil to us through copious amounts of thuddingly expository dialogue.
Lastly, why did both the parents of the kids David saves have to die? Sure it's good that the kids didn't also die, but it makes it a pretty downbeat act of heroism. I'd have thought that only the father dying -- which was necessary since it helped identify this janitor for him -- would have been enough.
Both times I've watched Unbreakable I've watched it too late at night for its slow and deliberate pacing. I still retain the memory of struggling with it in the theater that night in late 2000. And last night I also did have to take a nap during the movie, though that's increasingly common these days with any movie that I start watching after 10 p.m.
But I don't think a third viewing of Unbreakable one day in the middle of the afternoon after a ten-hour night's sleep will make me appreciate it significantly more. I still consider it one of Shyamalan's best three films -- those being the first three that most of us saw, excluding the first two he made -- but that's more an indication of just how weak the rest of his output has really been.
I haven't decided if I am concluding this weekend with a third movie tonight. If I do, it'll probably be either the third of those three best films -- Signs, which has always been my second favorite of his after The Sixth Sense, and which I have already seen multiple times -- or it will be picking up after Unbreakable with Glass, which I have not yet seen. I know Split fits into that chronology as well, but I don't feel the need to revisit that one before Glass, though I did like it.
I guess I was disenchanted enough with Unbreakable that I now have to consider if I might like something like The Visit or the aforementioned Split -- or even something like The Village, which is when I thought Shyamalan really turned the corner toward becoming a hack -- better than it. But I may not put that question to the test, because I really have no intention of going down some Shyamalan rabbit hole at the exclusion of all the other projects I've already started in 2023.
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