Unbreakable

Philadelphia. A train derails at full speed, killing 131 passengers. One man walks away without a scratch. That man is David Dunn, a former college football star turned security guard, played by Bruce Willis. His survival defies all logic, and it plants a seed of doubt in his own mind about who he really is.

M. Night Shyamalan followed up The Sixth Sense with this quiet, deliberate thriller that treats the superhero origin story like a psychological drama. Shot on location in Philadelphia, the film cost $75 million and grossed $248 million worldwide. But its real impact came later, as audiences and critics gradually recognized it as one of the most original takes on the genre ever made.[edit]

David Dunn lives a quiet, unremarkable life in Philadelphia. Married to Audrey (Robin Wright), their relationship has grown cold, and they now live separately, their young son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark) caught in the middle. David works as a security guard at a stadium, a job far beneath the promise he showed as a college football player. He carries a quiet sense of failure.

On a train returning from a job interview in New York, David falls asleep. The train derails in a catastrophic crash. David wakes up in the wreckage, the only survivor among 132 passengers. He has not a single scratch, not a bruise, not a broken bone. The authorities are baffled. David himself cannot explain it.

Shortly after the crash, a note appears on his windshield: How many days of your life have you been sick? It leads him to Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), a comic book art dealer who suffers from osteogenesis imperfecta, a condition that makes his bones so fragile they have broken dozens of times. Elijah calls himself Mr. Glass. He is obsessed with comic books and the idea that if there are people as fragile as he is, there must be someone who is the opposite: unbreakable.

Elijah presents his theory to David: the train crash was not luck. It was proof. David is something extraordinary. He survived not just this crash, but a car accident years earlier, a shooting, a fall from a height. Elijah believes David has superhuman strength, durability, and the ability to see the crimes of others through touch. David is skeptical, even hostile, to the idea. But then he starts noticing things. He can bench press more than he ever could. He never gets sick. And when he touches people, he sees flashes of their darkest acts.

David begins to test his abilities. He lifts weights that should crush him. He walks through a crowd and feels the wrongness in people. Joseph, his son, becomes convinced his father is a superhero. Audrey remains distant, unsure. Elijah pushes David to embrace his destiny, arguing that the world needs heroes. David resists, wanting only to repair his marriage and live a normal life. But the evidence mounts. He cannot ignore what he is.[edit]