Unbreakable (2000)

Upfront, I have to lay my cards on the table and confess that I am not a big fan of the works of M. Night Shyamalan.

Sixth Sense was very good, but rather a one-trick pony signalling the writer/director's obsession with trying to be the new Hitchcock, rather than develop a unique style of his own. Signs was one of the most ridiculous films I'd ever seen and The Village wasn't much better (I never bothered with the Lady In The Water).

I think he puts too much emphasis on the "twist" rather than the story that leads to the twist. It's like he's saying "look how clever I am" and challenging his audience to second guess him, so you spend the entire film trying to guess the twist and not concentrating on the story.

Thankfully, Unbreakable isn't like that. I understand it was originally intended as the first part of a trilogy, but poor box office meant the studio put the kibosh on any sequels (perhaps people were just looking for a rehash of Sixth Sense!)

While still obviously Hitchcockian, Unbreakable does feature a kind of twist in the final scene but it is more akin to a standard plot revelation and therefore isn't all that the film is about.

Viewed in 2007 the film is almost a dry run, a pilot episode, for Heroes with its tale of an ordinary Joe (Bruce Willis as security guard David Dunn), who survives a train wreck and slowly - thanks to pestering from a strange art gallery owner and comic book obsessive Elijah Price (Samuel L Jackson) - begins to realise that he has "superpowers".

Certainly the best written of Shymalan's portfolio - the scene where David, having rescued some children from a murderer, silently reveals his "secret identity" to his son is incredible - yet the ending still seems slightly rushed, although on reflection it's growing on me.

The parallels between Dunn's developing realisation of his destiny and his troubled personal life are a particular gem - he can't find satisfaction in the latter until he accepts the former, however insane it sounds in a real world context.

The comic book nut, and budding storyteller, in me would like to see Shymalan and Willis revisit the story of David Dunn at some stage, let us know what happened in the "next issue", as it were.