How The Unbreakable Film Series Failed To Deliver On Split’s Promise

Here’s how the Unbreakable film series ultimately failed to live up to its promise. Following the critical acclaim and commercial success that greeted M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, the filmmaker was being tipped to become the new Steven Spielberg. He followed the movie with Unbreakable, which cast Bruce Willis as David Dunn, an everyman who inexplicably survives a devastating train crash without receiving a single scratch. He’s soon approached by Samuel L. Jackson’s Elijah Price, a comic book fanatic with a brittle bone disease who believes Dunn could be a real-life superhero.

Unbreakable wasn’t quite the runaway success of The Sixth Sense, but in the years since is commonly praised as one of M. Night Shyamalan’s best movies. It also feels way ahead of its time in terms of deconstructing comic book movie tropes. The director had teased an Unbreakable trilogy, but as the years passed following its 2000 release, it seemed a return to that world was unlikely. Shyamalan later helmed Split, which cast James McAvoy as Kevin, a man with 24 different personalities – which includes a near invulnerable, cannibalistic monster named The Beast. The movie was a huge hit and received mostly warm reviews, especially for its massively unexpected stinger, which revealed it existed in the same universe as Unbreakable.

Split’s success as but guaranteed a third chapter, with the rechristened “Eastrail 177 Trilogy” capped off with 2019’s highly-anticipated Glass. This united Dunn, Kevin and featured the return of Sam Jackson’s Elijah, who was revealed in the first movie’s finale to be supervillain Mr Glass. In hindsight, it’s hard to imagine exactly what viewers expected of Glass, as the previous entries had eschewed explosive action in favor of introspective drama and exploring very human frailties.

Still, Glass’s promise of superhumans like Dunn and Kevin clashing and delivering on the promise of the original movie nearly 20 years later teased a more exciting finale. In 2015, before Split was released comedian Patton Oswalt pitched his fan idea for what an Unbreakable film series could be to Screen Junkies. Oswalt’s first sequel Unbreakables saw Dunn act as a mentor to other emerging superheroes, with the final entry Broken seeing Elijah Price break out of the asylum and framing Dunn as a villain; it also would have seen him seek a blood transfusion from Dunn to become unbreakable too.

Oswalt’s fake sequel Broken is probably more in line with what audiences were hoping Glass would be, but sadly, the final movie proved to be a dreary, self-important drama that bizarrely sidelined Dunn and Price. The latter pretends to be catatonic for half the runtime, leaving the bulk of the movie to McAvoy. While M. Night Shyamalan’s desire to make each installment unique – with Unbreakable being a mystery while Split is a horror movie – Glass is simply too stilted and inert. The “epic” showdown being Dunn and Kevin takes place in a parking lot, where Dunn is later drowned in a puddle by an organization attempting to suppress knowledge of superheroes.

Glass deserves credit for attempting to subvert expectations and deliver a more human take on a superhero tale, but it just doesn’t work emotionally. The story is flat, the logic of the ending is questionable and while its tries to reframe the narrative to ordinary people being just as heroic as so-called superheroes, the payoff to Dunn’s story after a two-decade wait is just grossly anti-climactic. If nothing else, the Unbreakable film series will remain unique in the annals of the genre, but the closing chapter feels like wasted potential.

About The Author

Padraig Cotter
(3484 Articles Published)

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It’s pronounced Paw-rick, not Pad-raig. Now that’s out of the way, a brief introduction. Padraig has been writing about film online since 2012, when a friend asked if he’d like to contribute the occasional review or feature to their site.

A part-time hobby soon blossomed into a career when he discovered he really loved writing about movies, TV and video games – he even (arguably) had a little bit of talent for it. He has written words for Den of Geek, Collider, The Irish Times and Screen Rant over the years, and can discuss anything from the MCU – where Hawkeye is clearly the best character – to the most obscure cult b-movie gem, and his hot takes often require heat resistant gloves to handle.

He’s super modern too, so his favorite movies include Jaws, Die Hard, The Thing, Ghostbusters and Batman. He can be found as i_Padds on Twitter making bad puns.

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