Shyamalan’s Unbreakable breaks new ground for him

It was still deemed an excellent performance for the man whose The Sixth Sense opened even more modestly around the same time last year. Rave reviews and word-of-mouth promotion made it the No. 1 American movie for weeks on end, resulting in takings of nearly $300 million by the time it wound down in America.

Following six Academy Award nominations — none fructified — the movie grossed more than $650 million worldwide, making it the ninth biggest earner in all-time film history. It also launched Shyamalan’s reputation as a big-time filmmaker.

That reputation was very much on the line with Unbreakable. Despite mixed reviews, Shyamalan appears to have scored another hit even if it may not match the scale of The Sixth Sense.

What Unbreakable shows is Shyamalan’s remarkable growth as a director — “The Sixth Sense was no accident”, The New York Times said in a review last weekend. The critic Roger Ebert called it “an uncommonly absorbing movie”.

Like The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable has a supernatural bent to it. The movie revolves around the sole survivor of a train accident (Bruce Willis as David Dunn) whose encounter with a mystical black comic-art dealer (Samuel Jackson as Elijah Price) changes his life.

At Price’s prodding, Dunn discovers superhuman qualities in himself, including the ability to spot criminals before they commit a crime. Like in The Sixth Sense, the movie has a surprise ending.

Unbreakable has certainly put Shyamalan in the big league, if he wasn’t already there. Time magazine reported in a profile this week that “no matter how Unbreakable does at the box office, Shyamalan has become a Hollywood player”. Spielberg and George Lucas have had discussions with him about writing the next installment of the Indiana Jones series.

“Just to be a part of that team, to be a fourth wheel along with Harrison (Ford), would be a very cool thing,” it quoted Shyamalan as saying.

Shyamalan, who is only 30, studied film at New York University’s Tisch School of Arts. He made his first movie Wide Awake, a comedy, when he was only 21. It turned out to be a disaster, and since then, his themes have turned darker, evident both in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable.

The Indian-American, who was born in Pondicherry but grew up in Ethiopia and America, says he feels a lot of pressure from success — mostly from himself.

“I don’t want 20 years from now for people to walk around and go, `He’s the guy who did The Sixth Sense‘. It should be, `He’s the guy who did The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and so on’. It shouldn’t even be that. It should be, just say my name, and it represents a body of work,” he says.