(Hey Night, this one is shorter and has better lines than your script.
Can't we use this instead?)

A Shamaylan Thrller, "Slightly Off From Normal"

"They have a warped perspective of reality", says the mother (Charlayne Woodard) of Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) about comic book villains, "slightly off from normal." A truly self-made man, M Night Shamaylan's passion for movies helped him break into Hollywood. Within an outsider's perspective, he has brought a fresh wind of change to an industry irritating its customer base with the trite, dazzling audiences everywhere with original endings and a renaissance of interesting camera angles, yet, on the other hand, like traditional comic book evil genius, he has all the same flaws. As writer, director and producer, he has no-one to tell him where he is going wrong, and, his rapid rise to pre-eminence, has led him to keep producing films with amateurish faults, rarely seen elsewhere - long, wordy dialogues that repeats the same concept in an excessive number of scenes and a deficit of wit that all brings the main body of his stories down to a dreary slow and tedious grind.

So impressed with Shamaylan's first script "The Sixth Sense" was Bruce Willis that he not only is rumoured to have done the film at cut-rate, but was clearly keen to appear in this, his next. As David Dunn, Bruce Willis plays a very ordinary man. His marriage to Audrey (Robin Wright Penn) on the rocks, this security guard whose life is suddenly turned upside down. The sole survivor from a train wreck that killed all 131 others onboard, the utterly unscathed Dunn finds himself the subject of stalking by a comic book store owner, Elijah Price who has a rare disease, making him so susceptable to extreme injury from the slightest of accidents that he is known as "Mr Glass". Convinced that Dunn was put on earth to protect people like him, Elijah's belief in Dunn's invincibility begins to rub off on his family with disasterous consequences, not least when he has a gun pulled on him by his own son, Joseph, played by the so aptly named, Spencer Treat Clark.

It is hard to think of another actor, so capable of working so well with young children than Willis, a veteran of many such hit adult & pre-teen child movies as "Lucky Number Sleven", "Hostage", "Sin City" and, of course, "The Sixth Sense", and here, Willis and Clark form a close couple who truly bring out the very best in each other. Backed by Samuel L Jackson in one of his finest roles as the obsessed comic book dealer, the audience are eased through a story, despite moving at a pace below that of sub-predestrian slow.

To discover that "Unbreakable" had a list of deleted scenes is remarkable, when it is already overly cumbersome and contains, at bare minimum, another 20minutes plus of surplus celluloid crying out for deletion. When Shamaylan hits us in last minute with a truly knockout punch of an ending, we, the audience, kick outselves for not seeing it coming in either the preceeding story nor in the ample symbolism that he has packed into it. Whether it was worth wading through ONE HOUR AND 46 MINUTES to reach it seems more than debatable. For a story centred on comic books, Shamaylan seeks to have very little about precis, but with a box office of over $249million worldwide, his audience certainly seem to have concluded that, regardless of his flaws, M Night Shamaylan should remain an unbreakable icon.

Are we there yet?

Film Critic: Robert L Thompsett