It’s easy to get your fingers tongue-tied when writing about the movies of M. Night Shyamalan — one of the central pleasures of the movies he has written and directed is how (and how unexpectedly) his melodramatic plots slowly unfurl. The emphasis is certainly on “slowly” in Unbreakable, the director's follow-up to his blockbuster, The Sixth Sense. While I promise not to divulge anything I consider a central secret to Unbreakable, those who want to savor every labyrinthine turn are welcome to stop reading after the next paragraph; those who haven’t seen The Sixth Sense are also encouraged to avert their eyes.

For them, the short version of this review is that Unbreakable isn’t a crowd-pleaser on the order of The Sixth Sense, and even if the movie doesn’t live up to all of its promise, it’s never less than mildly fascinating and signals that Shyamalan is in a class apart from, though not necessarily better than, other later-’90s wunderkindern, and that his next movie will be one to get very excited about.

When the opening-day matinee I attended was over, the departing (and near-capacity) audience grumbled a lot, mostly to the tune of, “Well, he thought he could do it again.” But whereas The Sixth Sense was a ghost story, Unbreakable is a comic-book movie — and while it’s well and good to fall under the sway of the former, the latter is so deeply stigmatized that Shyamalan was fighting the audience’s deep and often well-reasoned prejudices the whole time. Though Shyamalan fights valiantly, he perhaps doesn’t fight as well or as wisely as he should.

When David Dunne (Bruce Willis) is the only survivor of a catastrophic train accident in which everyone else aboard died, his mind reels with his good fortune. At the wake for the victims of the wreck, a note left on Dunne’s car questions if he’s ever been sick — a question he can’t answer, and he follows the note to its sender, Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), a comic-book art gallery curator with a bone disease that’s made him so frail as to have already sustained 54 breaks by middle age. Price, whose withdrawn childhood was nourished with comics, has adopted a worldview deeply informed by those four-color pulp fantasies. He reasons that if he and so many others are so frail, then it only follows that there must be some who are equally unfrail — that is, unbreakable.

Superheroes.

Shyamalan is jumping onto a train of thought currently prevalent in comic books: What would the everyday lives of superheroes be like, or the lives of the unpowered living in a superpowered world? Unbreakable’s fantasy is particularly unglamorous; Dunne’s a mopey schlep with a dull job and failing marriage, and his “powers,” of which he may very well have none at all, are believed to be derived not from cosmic rays or extraterrestrial origins but from the bell curve. More to the point, if he is superpowered, then he has been his whole life and just never realized it.

If that sounds like the height of bathos, wait until you see the movie. Practically all of its 100 minutes are concerned with Dunne determining just what, if indeed anything, makes him any different from anyone else; once he’s resolved the question in his own head, the movie’s almost over. It’s a peculiar trajectory and, I would wager, one almost no director could pull off to the tastes a popular audience.

Shyamalan comes as close as any could, although even he stumbles around a lot: from a serious-sounding title card about comic books’ popularity to Price’s solemn intonations about the evolution of pictography from cave scratchings to comic books (if Shyamalan is trying to use this to lend credence to Price’s theory, someone needs to sit down with him and help him differentiate form from content), the writer/director is trying too hard to strip away comics’ veneer of illegitimacy.

Despite those deficits, Unbreakable will enrapture you the way great movies do, or, at least, the way certain movies made by great directors do. The films of Shyamalan, like those of Paul Thomas Anderson or David O. Russell, betray the director’s youth, and if this manifests itself most often in the mistakes he makes, they’re often inspired mistakes smoothed over by youthful enthusiasm and an undiluted love of movies.

Shyamalan has a great bag of tricks he sometimes raids with an eye less turned toward maintaining a coherent style than toward making something pretty — the same is true of hack auteurs like Michael Bay or Simon West, but where their bag of tricks is glossy cinematography and incoherent editing, Shyamalan is borrowing from greats. An early conversation between two people on a train is shot from between the crack of the seats in front of them, meaning the camera can only show one participant at a time; more than one of the film’s extended takes contains two scenes, the second of which only begins when one of the characters moves to reveal something unexpected in the background.

It’s a breathtaking and audacious approach, and combined with the movie’s elegiac tone, you’re mesmerized from the onset. Shyamalan has the audience primed for any moment when he needs to play up his story’s spirituality — when a poncho-clad Dunne raises his arms in a crowded station, it sends shivers.

Shyamalan makes the most of his leads, as well; Willis’s underacting hits a new high/low (in the good way), and Jackson is allowed for once to explore his rage without first making a point of his blackness. If the movie’s secondary characters (Robin Wright Penn) don’t achieve what their peers did in The Sixth Sense, it’s because Unbreakable is not about how the world reacts to its two leads (well, one of them) but how they react to each other. As such, it’s a more intimate picture; it’s accordingly more difficult. It’s also up against that comic-book stigma and, to make matters worse, the surprise ending isn’t of the "Well, I’ve got to see that again!" variety.

But a number of movie-goers will respond to Unbreakable by saying just that; perhaps not as they walk out of the theater, but hours later, or days, reflecting on what they saw, weighing the profound emotions that may have been obscured on first viewing by the anticipation and second-guessing of its “Twilight Zone” twist.

Thanksgiving weekend is when studios loose family-oriented crowd-pleasers that require just a modicum of thought, if that; this year, they’ve also released a worthwhile thinking person’s movie.

What better twist do you want than that?

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)