a review of 不死劫

#27 Unbreakable (Google Play rental) I'm revisiting this one after finding myself basically enjoying -- with some reservations -- the latest Shyamalan film, Split. (see my previous FH365 entry) It's another early '00s favorite of mine that I hadn't really gone back to over the past 10 years, in part because of Shyamalan's steep decline as a creative voice during that time. But certain aspects of Split led me to wonder how well his earlier films, in particular Unbreakable, held up. Surprisingly well, all told. The performances (with some scene-by-scene exceptions) are uniformly excellent, and I'm not certain that Samuel L. Jackson has ever been more effectively used than he is here. This may also be the last time that I can remember Bruce Willis really bringing it for a performance, and he imbues it with a quietly sad soulfulness that I haven't seen him do since. And Shyamalan's script and direction is full of playful flourishes (upside-down imagery and primary colors signaling comic-book reality, masking off parts of the screen to simulate panel layouts, etc.) that surface the fantastical aspects of the story in a mostly subdued, organic way. I strongly suspect that the creators of the Netflix Marvel shows had Unbreakable in mind while creating their longform "grounded/street-level" superhero stories. On the other hand, this may have been the point where Shyamalan perhaps started to pick up the tin-eared tics that sunk much of his later work. The scene in which Willis's son, desperate to prove his dad's invulnerability, holds him at gunpoint at the dinner table is possibly one of the most amateurishly misfired scenes I've ever seen in a major motion picture; Suddenly, the actors all go into the kind of histrionics that one would expect from a high school theater production, to the point that I wonder if Willis and Wright deliberately tanked the scene, in the hope that Shyamalan would cut it. The same goes for the bizarre scene with a wheelchair-bound Jackson staring semi-catatonically at rows of comic book covers, which seems like another example of Shyamalan losing touch with what works on paper vs. what works on screen. All in all, it's still a rewarding film after all these years, even though it does appear to carry the seeds of its creators' eventual popular culture downfall. I was encouraged by what he was able to do in Split, and hope he continues his apparent upswing as an interesting filmmaker.