Reviews

(some spoilers)

I visited IMDB after seeing this movie on TV hoping for a few spoilers to tell me what I'd seen. OK, to be fair, my daughter and a troop of her 11 year old friends had chosen that night to lens their own video production which sometimes had my TV room as its stage so from time to time I had a distraction, but for the life of me I couldn't make much of this film.

As close as I could come, there are two guys, Willis and Jackson. One is weak, the Broken and the other strong, the Unbreakable. Willis is the unbreakable title character who manages to make it to about 40 years old smart enough to get a job, a skank of a wife, a child and a university degree, but too stupid to note that he is about the World's Strongest Man, Invulnerable as Superman (except for water, his Kryptonite) and can't be injured even in the face of a horrific car crash and gosh knows what else life's thrown him. After he survives yet again (this time a train crash) he meets Jackson, who breaks like glass, who tells him what anyone by now could figure out that he is different in a sort of fine way. Still it takes Willis about 90 movie minutes, or about five days subjective time, if you're watching this clunker, for him to fully absorb this factoid any but some movie dimwit would have caught by the time he was 8 years old.

Along the way even Willis' kid has it figured out and offers to prove it by shooting him in way of demonstration. Also we get to see Jackson prove he too is a dimwit as he, after having broken in the past 37 or is it 47 or 8787 or some number of bones gets involved in a pointless chase, falls down some stairs and breaks about 97 more bones just to get him even grimmer. People, if there is a smile or a blue sky in this movie, I missed it.

This may be the only movie since PI where nobody smiles. Even Willis, who starts the movie estranged from his wife, then seems to be making up with her (for no known reason) manages to never show any warmth to either she or his son. This is a cold, cold movie on all fronts with no character development of any sort. They start as islands and they remain so.

I recommend the movie as an exercise in style and look. I recognize it as a kind some folks enjoy as a slow builder and also acknowledge that the distractions of last night when I saw it may have caused me to miss the point. However, I see the characters is idiots, the pace glacial and I would have preferred watching paint cure.

OK, the battles are wonderful and worth the price of admission. Heck, they're worth 10x the price of admission and also worth the tedium of sitting through this borefest. The entire movie was, in a word, silly. OK two words - overwrought and silly too. This is like one over long Star Trek episode where the central characters can throw away lives of the bit players at will because the movie only focuses on the repaeating cast. So the kings and sorcerer and other players think nothing of essentially tossing away the lives of all their subjects and those subjects, we're supposed to believe, support these characters.

Worse, these central characters are whingingly stupid. They do one stupid thing after another and nobody calls them on it. The things they do, like basic tactical errors in the battles, aren't just obvious in retrospect, but obvious when they occur.

One of the dozen endings of this movie has the people cheer as a new king gets himself crowned. Had this movie had a bit of integrity, they people would have risen up, overthrown the worthless set of royals and instituted a commune instead.

I was waiting for that ending, but it didn't show up. Maybe in the DVD.