M. Night Shyamalan’s comic book movie trilogy is quite different from the MCU and DC franchises that have completely changed the landscape of the movie industry. Whereas the Marvel and DC movies capitalize on all-star casts, monumental effects budgets, and marathon battles scenes that hold the fate of worlds and galaxies in the balance, the films in Shyamalan’s Unbreakable trilogy revolve far more around character development and the (super)human condition than the physical showdowns where heroes and villains clash.
Shyamalan gets a lot of heat from fans, and most of it well-deserved. Yet even his greatest detractors must admit to his originality. His trilogy was not founded as some experiment intended to piggyback off the comic book movie craze that has spring-boarded actors into stars and millionaires into billionaires for the past two decades. Unbreakable was released in 2000, the very same year as X-Men, Bryan Singer’s smash hit that began the comic book movie boom. The phenomenal success of the MCU was undoubtedly the biggest factor in Universal Studios financing Split 16 years later, but Shyamalan still held true to his original vision, resisting any temptation to “Marvel it up.” Glass closed out the trilogy in 2017 with the same ethos: making something completely unbelievable feel believable, but with a whole lot of twists.
Oh boy, does M. Night love him some twists. And when one twist may not feel quite twisty enough, he throws a twist on top of the twist and rounds that twist out with yet another twist. Where Marvel and DC rely on sick fight scenes that look just as incredible as anything you’ll ever see in a comic book, Shyamalan’s crutch is his adoration of twists.
It definitely gets old after awhile. You end up going into his films trying to figure out what the twist will be before it happens, thus turning the entire film (or franchise) into a gimmick. There’s nothing wrong with being a gimmicky director, but he treats his subject matter so seriously that you get the feeling that he hates being known as the “twist” guy.
It’s hard for me to determine if the Unbreakable series makes is a solid movie franchise. It consists of two good movies, another product of indeterminate nature that includes scenes and dialogue, and half a dozen Shyamalaniacal twists that vary between wow! and come on! I’m hoping to come to a final conclusion as I break down the films here one by one with No Spoilers!
Unbreakable (2000)
David Dunn (Bruce Willis) is a working class schlub that slogs through life in a depressed haze. His marriage is on the rocks, he makes a meager living as a security guard at a Philadelphia football stadium, and he is utterly devoid of enthusiasm. Heading home on a high-speed train one day from a job interview in New York, the train crashes. David wakes up in the hospital to realize that everybody on board was killed except for him, who somehow came out of the wreck without a scratch.
David is then confronted by Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), an artist and comic book enthusiast with a rare genetic disorder that makes his bones incredibly brittle. Elijah takes a keen interest in David’s survival of the crash, probing him with personal questions and postulating that he may be something far more exceptional than a mild-mannered security guard.
Unbreakable focuses on the aftermath of David surviving the train crash and the effect it has on his relationships. His internal struggle is based around the theme of security. Who is David obligated to protect, and how should he go about doing it? Does this crippled cook’s theory hold weight? Does his survival carry with it an obligation to protect others? Can he shield his fracturing family from his exploits?
This film is far off the superhero path that has been beaten to death for the past 23 years, and I mean that as a compliment. This is a very human movie about a man with very human problems, one of which being that he may not just be human after all. Willis is perfect as the sullen average Joe doing battle with his inner turmoil, and Jackson is even better as the obsessed freak who has built his entire life around his harebrained assumption about humanity.
I’m fascinated with movies that attempt to make unbelievable subject matter feel as believable as possible. Thus, I’ve always been a fan of Unbreakable. I appreciate the concept and admire the execution. The twist at the end is a bit predictable, but it ties all the crucial story elements together and the film cannot really exist without it. Had I known back in 2000 that this movie would be the first of a trilogy, I’d have been very excited to see the second installment.
Split (2016)
The second part of the trilogy has virtually nothing in common with Unbreakable, and it’s really from a completely different genre when you think about it. Unbreakable is a drama/mystery, whereas I’d classify Split as a psychological thriller/horror. You don’t even realize these films have anything to do with each other until the closing seconds, which is one of the multiple twists of the third act. I realize that disclosing this could be considered a spoiler, but if you’re reading this column then you already realize that we’re talking about a trilogy here. So relax.
Split opens with three teenage girls being abducted by Kevin (James McAvoy), a deeply disturbed man who we soon find out has been diagnosed with 23 different personalities. Kevin imprisons the girls in a somewhat furnished basement at an undisclosed location where his various personalities take turns preparing the captives for the pending arrival of the Beast, Kevin’s most violent personality, who evidently does horrible things to his prey. The girls plot escape schemes while Kevin ducks out periodically to visit his elderly psychiatrist (Betty Buckley), who is familiar with each of his personalities but unaware of his criminal activities.
This is the James McAvoy show. At least six of Kevin’s 23 personalities make appearances here, and McAvoy gives each of them their own signature movements, diction, idiosyncrasies, et cetera in what I have to assume is an actor’s dream role. It’s a lot of fun to see the guy who played a young Professor Xavier rapidly alternate between playing an outgoing social butterfly, an obsessive-compulsive grump, a genteel female caretaker, a precocious nine-year-old boy, and back again. The audience is never truly in fear for the safety of the kidnapped girls until the Beast finally arrives, at which point all bets are off.
We’ve seen film characters with multiple personalities before, but Shyamalan puts his own spin on it by introducing the (questionable) psychiatric concept of different personalities living inside the same body while each having their own unique talents, deficiencies, and physical traits. After seeing a hundred different comic book characters with embarrassingly similar backstories, this alteration to the formula is really a breath of fresh air. This is a pretty damn entertaining movie. The climax and twists feel a bit empty, but that makes sense in the final five seconds when you realize that the story isn’t finished yet.
Glass (2017)
This is where the plane crashes into the mountain.
Yikes, was this movie a miss. Unbreakable and Split laid a promising foundation for a superhero showdown, or even a new spinoff franchise to carry the torch of this trilogy. To his credit, Shyamalan didn’t take the obvious money grab and conclude Glass with an irritatingly obvious maybe/maybe not cliffhanger to try to convince Universal and Disney (in a very rare joint-studio venture) to greenlight the construction of a TCU (Twist-vel Cinematic Universe). M. Night made a concerted effort to wrap up his vision for this trilogy and conclude the story for each character in a manner that satisfied his audience. The problem is that I can’t imagine how anyone could ever feel satisfied with this conclusion.
David Dunn, now known to the public as The Overseer, is hot on the trail of Kevin and his various personalities, AKA The Horde, who is still snatching girls and locking them up in dingy hideouts. The Overseer and The Horde clash early on in a disappointing showdown that lands them both in a mental institution with grossly inadequate security measures that the movie hilariously tries to pass off as air-tight security measures. We quickly find that a catatonic Elijah Price, AKA Mr. Glass, is also a patient at the institution. They are all under the care of psychiatrist Dr. Staple, a name with such hacky symbolism that I get physically angry when I see it in print.
I make a big deal about not posting spoilers in these reviews, but let’s be serious here. It’s a superhero movie where the principal characters get locked up in a mental institution during the first act. You now they’re gonna break out, you know they’re gonna fight, and you know that very little of what happens between their confinement and their escape will mean a damn thing. This movie is all about the big showdown at the end, and that big showdown is a big letdown.
M. Night Twist-alan just keeps on zagging when the zig would have been much better. The movie ends about six times before the real ending, which was supposed to hit us in the feels like when Lucius Fox found out the autopilot had been fixed, but instead hits us in the nuts like when we found out that Maggie shot Mr. Burns. The stories of David, Kevin, and Elijah all reach horrendous conclusions, with their characters rendered so uninteresting by the end that you could care less if Glass kickstarted a new superhero universe or not.
This is not a comic book movie about the hero saving the day, although it should have been. It’s an “ensemble” feature that lacks enough entertaining content for one main character, let alone three. If Hydrox tried to make an X-Men movie, it would turn out a lot like Glass.
So, what have we learned today, class?
It’s great to put your own slant on a genre where the basic tropes have all been done to death already. It’s also cool to throw in a twist ending at times. But when you build your brand entirely around doing things differently and finishing up with a huge twist (or seven), you become even worse than a gimmick. You become a gimmick that doesn’t even realize or appreciate your own gimmickry. You become a pretentious knob trying to pass off gimmicky stuff as revolutionary art.
Taken as individual movies, Unbreakable and Split are both pretty good. They don’t match, but a decent third movie could have sensibly tied them together. Glass tied them together, but in no way was it sensible. Sometimes you need to stop trying to reinvent the wheel and just make a cool movie.
