Why Unbreak­able remains the ulti­mate super­hero movie

In the Super­man comics there is a char­ac­ter called Bizarro, a twist­ed, vil­lain­ous inver­sion of the icon­ic hero. Bizarro looks and acts like Super­man but lives by the exact reverse log­ic: he says adjec­tives to mean their oppo­site, he sees it as a crime to do good, and so on. There’s a great Sein­feld episode based on the character.

In today’s age of super­hero movie ubiq­ui­ty, it’s tempt­ing to read 2000’s Unbreak­able as a Bizarro ver­sion of every­thing that pro­ceed­ed it. The basic sim­i­lar­i­ties are all there: a cloaked pro­tag­o­nist with super­hu­man strength locks horns with a schem­ing, crim­i­nal­ly insane supervil­lain. We see the reluc­tant hero, played here by Bruce Willis, come to terms with his pow­ers, use them for civic pro­tec­tion and watch him win the girl before final­ly over­com­ing his neme­sis. We get both char­ac­ters’ ori­gin sto­ries in flash­back, and both are played by Hol­ly­wood A‑listers. It’s the pre­em­i­nent block­buster blueprint.

And yet it by no means and exag­ger­a­tion to say that Unbreak­able is the exact antithe­sis of Mar­vel and DC’s cur­rent out­put. For starters, it clocks in at 106 min­utes and its cast bare­ly extends beyond the four cen­tral actors. Noth­ing explodes, erupts or is shot at from begin­ning to end. There is no shout­ing. The film is shot and cut with a near-mad­den­ing degree of patience, its sound­track almost noise­less for long spells, and it resorts to eye-catch­ing CGI not once.

It may be anath­e­ma to the box-office behe­moths of today, but there’s no doubt that M Night Shyamalan’s film is a super­hero movie in the truest sense. Nor that, as its cam­era glides affec­tion­ate­ly down the aisles of com­ic-book stores drink­ing in vin­tage illus­tra­tions, it shows a gen­uine pas­sion for the orig­i­nal form that is unmatched by any­thing that has come since (with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of Sam Raimi’s Spi­der­man films).

The present glut of cin­e­mat­ic uni­verse-forg­ing com­ic-book adap­ta­tions has born some decent films and some ter­ri­ble ones, but none can claim to rival the atmos­phere and immer­sion of Unbreak­able. Remem­ber the face-claw­ing tedi­um that was the final hour of Man of Steel? Inde­struc­tible hero and inde­struc­tible vil­lain throw­ing each oth­er through brick walls ad nau­se­um, CGI sky­scrap­ers reduced to CGI rub­ble at a rate of knots, the lev­el of per­il remain­ing at pre­cise­ly zero through­out. Unbreakable’s final encounter includes not a sin­gle build­ing flat­tened, not a sin­gle punch thrown and lasts all of five min­utes. Instead, we see Willis’ David Dunn defeat his arch-neme­sis by dob­bing him in to the author­i­ties. It is a scene of under­stat­ed grav­i­tas, per­haps the most affect­ing show­down of any mod­ern super­hero movie.

It’s also sig­nif­i­cant that the oth­er char­ac­ter at the heart of Unbreak­able is Samuel L Jackson’s vil­lain. Six years before he was being dri­ven to high-pitched dis­trac­tion by those mutha­fuckin’ snakes on that mutha­fuckin’ plane, Hollywood’s keen­est scenery-steal­er took to the screen with unchar­ac­ter­is­tic restraint as embit­tered com­ic-art deal­er Eli­jah Price, bare­ly rais­ing his voice above a mur­mur through­out (and his one con­ces­sion to the­atri­cal­i­ty, the berat­ing of a cus­tomer intend­ing on buy­ing a lim­it­ed edi­tion print for his kid, works as a nice metaphor for how the film wants to treats its audi­ence like adults).

If Heath Ledger’s Jok­er was so arrest­ing because of his lack of motive, Jackson’s cane-clutch­ing bad­die chills pre­cise­ly because his are so plain­ly stat­ed. But while Ledger used a man­ic phys­i­cal­i­ty to unnerve, Jack­son achieves the same end through the oppo­site means: his res­olute­ly undemon­stra­tive ​“Mr Glass” is straight from the John Doe school of dead-calm supervil­lainy. The scene where he repeat­ed­ly sab­o­tages a book store clerk’s attempts to wheel him out of the shop is a more effec­tive, more affect­ing demon­stra­tion of direc­tion­less rage than any of the extrav­a­gant acts of ter­ror­ism enact­ed by his screen successors.

While today’s super­hero movies aim for excite­ment via loud action and bloat­ed nar­ra­tives, Unbreak­able is dead­ly qui­et, only light­ly dust­ed with plot and told with an every­day real­ism that verges on mun­dan­i­ty. Its sole fight sequence is unpleas­ant and ungain­ly, active­ly un-thrilling, shot from a dis­tance in one unbro­ken take. Admit­ted­ly the film’s slow pac­ing can seem a bit strained at times, but it’s a direc­to­r­i­al style that takes guts to pull off this effec­tive­ly – and one that’s aged well over a 16-year peri­od in which fren­zied spec­ta­cle has become the new normal.

Two years after Unbreak­able was released, Raimi’s first Spi­der-Man film became the high­est gross­ing film of that year, tak­ing close to half a bil­lion dol­lars world­wide and effec­tive­ly ignit­ing the super­hero movie boom. A decade on, Marvel’s list of past and prospec­tive releas­es stands at 45, while DC hav­ing lat­ter­ly leapt aboard the gravy train. Between them, these stu­dios are work­ing hard to ensure that the sum­mer block­buster sea­son remains choc-a-bloc with super­hero movies, a trend which shows no sign of let­ting up. ​“These are mediocre times, Mrs Dunn,” Jack­son tells Robin Wright’s Audrey Dunn in Unbreak­able. ​“Peo­ple are start­ing to lose hope.” He didn’t know the half of it.