Unbreakable (film)

Elijah Price, comic-book art dealer, has brittle bone disease. He develops a theory based on comic book stories that there must be someone "unbreakable" at the opposite extreme.

David Dunn, a former star football quarterback turned security guard, becomes the sole survivor of a train crash which kills 130 others. After a memorial service for the victims he finds a note on his car windshield asking if he has ever been ill and inviting him to Elijah's art gallery. David realizes that he has indeed never been ill, and goes with his young son Joseph to meet Elijah. He is unsettled and leaves when Elijah proposes his theory of real-life superheroes, but later, curious, finds he can bench press 350 pounds, well above his expectation. Joseph idolizes his father believing him to be a superhero, although David maintains he is just an ordinary man.

David challenges Elijah's theory with an incident from his childhood when he almost drowned. Elijah suggests that highlights the common convention whereby superheroes have a weakness, contending that David's might be water. David recalls the car accident that ended his athletics career, in which he had been unharmed and ripped off the car door to rescue Audrey. He had used the accident as an excuse to quit football because Audrey disliked the violence of the sport.

Under Elijah's influence, David realizes that his "natural instinct" for picking out dangerous people during security checks is actually extrasensory perception. Consciously honing this ability, David discovers that touch contact with people permits him glimpses of criminal acts they have committed. As people bump into him in a crowd he senses crimes they have perpetrated; theft, assault, rape, and he finds one he can act on: a sadistic janitor who has invaded a family home, killed the father, and is now holding the wife and two children captive. He follows the janitor to the victims' house and frees the children. The janitor pushes him into the swimming pool where he nearly drowns as he cannot swim but is rescued by the children. He kills the janitor with a chokehold, but discovers the mother is already dead. The next morning David shows Joseph a newspaper article featuring a sketch of the anonymous hero whom Joseph recognizes as his father, and promises to keep his secret.

David meets Elijah's mother who explains the difference between villains who fight heroes with physical strength as against those who use their intelligence. Elijah asks David to shake his hand, which reveals that Elijah was responsible for numerous high-profile "accidents", including David's train crash, while seeking a superhero rival. Elijah believes they are destined to become each other's nemesis and adopts his childhood nickname "Mr. Glass" as his supervillain moniker. David reports Elijah's criminal attacks to the police, and Elijah is confined to a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane.

• Bruce Willis as David Dunn, a former football player who became a security guard who can see visions of crimes committed by whomever he touches and possesses superhuman strength and durability but is weak to being in water out of fear of drowning.
  • Davis Duffield plays a 20-year-old David.
• Samuel L. Jackson as Elijah Price / Mr. Glass, a comic book theorist who has Type I osteogenesis imperfecta and was revealed to be the man behind the train crash incident.
  • Johnny Hiram Jamison plays a 13-year-old Elijah.
• Robin Wright as Audrey Dunn, David's wife who works as a physical therapist.
  • Laura Regan plays a 20-year-old Audrey.
• Spencer Treat Clark as Joseph Dunn, David's son who believes his father is a superhero.
• Charlayne Woodard as Mrs. Price, Elijah's mother.
• Eamonn Walker as Dr. Mathison
• Leslie Stefanson as Kelly
• Michaelia Carroll as Babysitter
• Whitney Sugarman as Physical Therapist
• Bostin Christopher as Comic Book Clerk
• Elizabeth Lawrence as School Nurse
• Chance Kelly as Orange Suit Man
• Michael Kelly as Dr. Dubin
• M. Night Shyamalan as Stadium Drug Dealer. In the subsequent film Glass, Shyamalan's character Jai, the security guard from Dr. Karen Fletcher's apartment building in Split, is implied to be this character from the stadium.

In October 2018, M. Night Shyamalan confirmed a popular fan theory stating that the child and mother who bump into David Dunn outside a stadium, credited as "Five-Year-Old Boy" and "Woman Walking By" and portrayed by Joey Hazinsky and Dianne Cotten Murphy, respectively, were younger versions of the characters Kevin Wendell Crumb and Penelope Crumb from Split, which was confirmed in the 2019 film Glass.[13]

When M. Night Shyamalan conceived the idea for Unbreakable, the outline had a comic book's traditional three-part structure (the superhero's "birth", his struggles against general evil-doers, and the hero's ultimate battle against the "archenemy"). Finding the birth section most interesting, he decided to write Unbreakable as an origin story. During the filming of The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan had already approached Bruce Willis for the lead role of David Dunn.[14] With Willis and Samuel L. Jackson specifically in mind for the two leading characters, Shyamalan began to write Unbreakable as a spec script[15] during post-production on The Sixth Sense.[16] Jackson recalled meeting Willis in a casino in Casablanca while he was on vacation prior to Unbreakable's production; Willis told Jackson that he had just finished filming for Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense and told Jackson about the new script that was written for both of them.[17]

With the financial and critical success of The Sixth Sense in August 1999, Shyamalan gave Walt Disney Studios a first-look deal for Unbreakable. In return, Disney purchased Shyamalan's screenplay at a "spec script record" for $5 million. He was also given another $5 million to direct. Disney decided to release Unbreakable under their Touchstone Pictures banner. It also helped Shyamalan establish his own production company, Blinding Edge Pictures.[18] Julianne Moore dropped out of portraying Audrey, David's wife, in favor of her role as Clarice Starling in Hannibal. Robin Wright was cast in her place.[19] Principal photography began on April 25, 2000 and ended that July. The majority of filming took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the film's setting.[20]

Shyamalan and cinematographer Eduardo Serra chose several camera angles to simulate the look of a comic book panel. Various visual narrative motifs were also applied. Several scenes relating to the Mr. Glass character involve glass. As a newborn, he is primarily seen reflected in mirrors, and as a young child, he is seen reflected in a blank TV screen. When he leaves his calling card on the windshield of David Dunn's car, he is reflected in a glass frame in his art gallery. Jackson requested his walking stick be made of glass to make his character more menacing. Using purple as Mr. Glass's color to David Dunn's green was also Jackson's idea.[21] Mr. Glass's wig was modeled after Afro-American statesman Frederick Douglass.[14] As he does in his other films, Shyamalan makes a cameo appearance; he plays a man David suspects of dealing drugs inside the stadium.

More than 15 minutes of footage was deleted during post-production of Unbreakable. These scenes are available on the DVD release.[22]

Willis and Jackson had previously worked together on Die Hard with a Vengeance, Pulp Fiction, and Loaded Weapon 1.

James Newton Howard was approached by Shyamalan to work on Unbreakable immediately after scoring The Sixth Sense. "He sat there and storyboarded the whole movie for me", Howard said. "I've never had a director do that for me."[23] Shyamalan wanted a "singularity" tone for the music. "He wanted something that was very different, very distinctive, that immediately evoked the movie when people heard it,"[23] Howard explained. Howard and Shyamalan chose to simplify the score, and minimized the number of instruments (strings, trumpets and piano), with limited orchestrations. Some compositions were recorded in a converted church in London. "You could have recorded the same music in a studio in Los Angeles, and it would have been great, but there is something about the sound of that church studio," Howard remarked. "It's definitely more misterioso."[23]

Filmmaker and comic book writer Kevin Smith felt Unbreakable was briefly similar to a comic book titled Mage: The Hero Discovered, written and illustrated by Matt Wagner.[24]

As in comic books, the main characters have their identified color schemes and aliases. David's are green and "Security" or "Hero", while Elijah's are purple and "Mr. Glass". The colors show up in their clothes, the wallpaper and bed sheets in their houses, Elijah's note to David, and various personal items.[14] The people whose bad deeds are sensed by David are identified by an article of clothing in a single bright color (red, orange), to contrast them with the dark and dreary color scheme typical of the rest of the movie (but not of most comic books). Several scenes also depict characters through reflections or doorways, as if framing them in a picture similar to comic books.[14]

After the film's release, rumors of possible sequels began circulating in different interviews and in film fansites. In 2000, Bruce Willis was quoted as hoping for an Unbreakable trilogy.[42] In December 2000, Shyamalan denied rumors he wrote Unbreakable as the first installment of a trilogy, saying he was not even thinking about it.[42] In August 2001, Shyamalan stated that, because of successful DVD sales, he had approached Touchstone Pictures about an Unbreakable sequel, an idea Shyamalan said the studio originally turned down because of the film's disappointing box office performance.[43] In a September 2008 article, Shyamalan and Samuel L. Jackson said there was some discussion of a sequel when the film was being made, but that it mostly died with the disappointing box office. Jackson said he was still interested in a sequel but Shyamalan was non-committal.[44] In February 2010, Willis said that Shyamalan was "still thinking about doing the fight movie between me and Sam that we were going to do", and stated that as long as Jackson was able to participate he would be "up for it".[45]

• 2000 in film
• List of American superhero films
• List of films featuring home invasions
• Superhero film
• List of sole survivors of aviation accidents and incidents

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