Unbreakable(2000)

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

TV-MA
Rated PG-13 for mature thematic elements including some disturbing violent content, and for a crude sexual reference
1h 46m

Release Date: Nov 22, 2000 | Wide

A man learns something extraordinary about himself after a devastating accident.

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Director & Top Cast

M. Night Shyamalan
Director

Alan Paule
Dodi

Technical Specifications

Sound Mix: Dolby Digital EX,SDDS,DTS-ES

Aspect Ratio: 2.39 : 1

Other Details

Country of Origin: United States

Language: English

Summaries

Plot Summary

A baby is born in west Philadelphia. This is Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson). Elijah is so brittle that he is born with broken arms and legs. As he grows older, he is taunted at school and called Mr. Glass by his classmates. As an adult, he runs a successful high priced comic book art gallery specializing in original drawings of superheroes. David Dunn (Bruce Willis) is a security guard at the local college stadium. His marriage is crumbling and his wife, Audrey Dunn (Robin Wright Penn), sleeps downstairs in their son's room, and David sleeps upstairs with his son (Spencer Treat Clark).On his way back home from a job interview in New York, David's train malfunctions and derails, killing everyone on board except David. He doesn't even have a scratch. After the memorial service for the crash victims, David finds a note on his windshield. It's from a store named "Limited Editions" (Elijah's store) and the note asks, "Have you ever been sick?" David takes his son to "Limited Editions" where he meets Elijah.Elijah explains his theory to David. If Elijah can be born with brittle bones and very easily hurt, shouldn't there be someone the exact opposite? Elijah has researched every disaster to find a sole survivor without a scratch but has had no luck. After years of searching, he finally has found one in David Dunn.David thinks it's interesting but really just thinks Elijah is nuts. Back at the stadium, David gets a call that there is someone asking for David. It's Elijah and he starts explaining his comic book theories to David. Theories about everyday men being superheroes. David bumps into a guy in line and tells the security at the end of the line to start frisking people. They watch as the guy David bumped in to, sees everyone being frisked and leaves the line. Elijah asks David what that was all about and David tells him that when he bumped him, he had an image of a certain kind of handgun.David goes back to work but Elijah follows the guy David bumped into. They go down a long flight of stairs, Elijah falls shattering his leg and breaking several other bones but the last thing he sees is the man's handgun, just as David described it. Elijah was right, David does have some kind of special gift.Back at home, David is working out in the basement with his weight set. His son believed everything Elijah said about David being a hero with a special gift. David asks his son to take some weight off but without him knowing, he puts more weight on. David is now up to 350lbs. He has had all this strength all along that he never knew.Elijah needs his leg rehabbed and his nurse is Audrey, David's wife. Elijah asks her questions about her and David and she explains to him, David was a star football player but got in a car accident. David never played football again. She and David got married after that. Had he continued to play, she knows they would have grown apart.Back at work, David gets a call from his son's school that his son has been hurt. His son had hoped that some of David's superhero traits had rubbed off on him. The school nurse remembers David from when he was at that same school. In fact, it was because of David that they have strict rules about the pool. It seems that David had been picked on near the pool when he was a student there. He fell in and was left in the pool to drown. He was found at the bottom of the pool but somehow survived.David tells this story to Elijah, that in fact, David can get hurt. Elijah tells him that every superhero has a weakness. David's kryptonite is water. The water from the pool and the water from the icy roads. David's wife decides that him surviving the train crash is a sign that maybe they should give their marriage another try. They go out on a "date" and he explains to her that he felt their marriage was over when he stopped waking her up after he had a bad dream.David goes to Elijah and tells him he is right; he has never been sick or injured in any way. Elijah tells him that it's no coincidence that David is in the security field. He needs to go to where people are and protect them.It's a rainy day and David, wearing a hooded rain poncho heads to Penn station. Hundreds of people are passing by. Whenever someone bumps into David he has a vision of that person doing something evil. One is a jewel thief, another a sexual predator, but when the maintenance man bumps into him, David gets a horrible vision. The vision is of the man going to someone's home and killing the homeowner.David, still wearing the poncho now looking more and more like a superhero's cape, follows the guy as he leaves work. The guy goes to a nice house in a nice neighborhood. David sneaks in the back and finds the dead homeowner inside. He goes upstairs and rescues two sisters tied up in their bathroom. He goes into another room and finds the mother tied up. The window is open, and David looks out. When he turns back around, there is the maintenance worker who pushes David out the window. David lands on the backyard pool that has its winter cover on. Suddenly, the cover starts collapsing with David's weight and he gets all tangled up underwater with the cover. He is drowning again but the two sisters force a pole down to him and David grabs it and is saved.David heads back upstairs and wrestles with the guy and finally kills him by breaking his neck. David is back at home, hanging up his cape, or poncho, and carrying his sleeping wife upstairs to their bed. She wakes up and asks him what is wrong. "I had a bad dream" he says. In the morning while having breakfast, David slides the newspaper over to his son and holds a finger to his mouth to shush him. The headline tells of a mystery hero that saved the two girls. The picture is an artist's rendition of what the girls saw. It shows a superhero-like figure with a hood and cape. The boy looks up at his dad and David just smiles and nods.David goes to Elijah's gallery where Elijah is having a huge gathering for a special show. He and David go to Elijah's back office so they can discuss what had happened. Elijah has been in a wheelchair since his fall. He is really proud of David, and they shake hands.Just like Christopher Walken in Stephen King's "The Dead Zone", while shaking hands, David has a vision of Elijah setting a building on fire, another vision of Elijah causing a plane crash and finally, a vision of Elijah exiting the driving compartment of David's train that crashed. David looks around Elijahs office and is horrified at what he sees. Newspaper clippings of hundreds of disasters from around the world. Elijah is the mastermind behind all these events and has staged them for his own selfish benefit.Just like in the comics, every evil villain needs a worthy adversary and Elijah has finally found his. David backs away in horror as Elijah, who in his wheelchair now looks more like Professor X of the X-men, proclaims... "They call me Mr. Glass!" Just before the final credits, a message appears that says that David contacted the authorities and Elijah is now in a mental institution.

Storyline

David Dunn (Willis) is taking a train from New York City back home to Philadelphia after a job interview that didn't go well when his car jumps the tracks and collides with an oncoming engine, with David the only survivor among the 131 passengers on board. Astoundingly, David is not only alive, he hardly seems to have been touched. As David wonders what has happened to him and why he was able to walk away, he encounters a mysterious stranger, Elijah Prince (Samuel L. Jackson), who explains to David that there are a certain number of people who are "unbreakable" -- they have remarkable endurance and courage, a predisposition toward dangerous behavior, and feel invincible but also have strange premonitions of terrible events. Is David "unbreakable"? And if he is, what are the physical and psychological ramifications of this knowledge? Engulfed in perpetual sadness, David Dunn--a former football player and now a security guard with an unsuccessful marriage--emerges unscathed from a devastating train crash that claimed the lives of 131 passengers. Before long, Dunn's polar opposite--the brittle-boned comic-book art dealer, Elijah Price--approaches the tragedy's sole survivor, utterly convinced that luck had nothing to do with his miraculous survival. The mysterious stranger has a preposterous theory which explains the condition of the man whose bones never break. However, do life's antitheses define one's destiny? Above all--if there's a connection between Price and Dunn--is David, indeed, "unbreakable"? — Nick Riganas Security Guard David Dunn miraculously survives a catastrophic train crash outside Philadelphia. Not only is he the sole survivor out of 132 passengers, he also is completely unharmed. A little later, comic book specialist Elijah Price contacts him to confront David with an incredible theory: Elijah, who has been nicknamed "Mr. Glass" due to his more than fragile bones, thinks that David has got all which he himself lacks. The two of them "seem to be linked by a curve, but sitting on opposite ends". First, David does not believe the strange man, but every single thing he had said proves to be true: David has never ever been hurt or sick in his life, his physical strength is larger than normal and he has a skill which others don't. Slowly, David begins to discover the shocking truth behind Mr. Price's assumptions. But after all, David's fate is not only to find his real place in the world. It also is about proving Elijah's theory of his own existence. — Julian Reischl David Dunn's marriage is crumbling, and he's thinking of moving to New York. Then when he's coming home from a job interview, his train derails and he is the only survivor. More than that, he doesn't have a scratch on him. David is contacted by Elijah Price, who runs a comic book art gallery and suffers from a genetic condition that makes his bones very easy to break. Elijah has been a comic book fan all his life, and has developed a theory that they are what remains of an ancient system of storytelling, and the superheroes they are about are based on real people. Elijah believes David may be one of these people. He has hardly ever been injured or sick, and he has tremendous strength, plus an uncanny ability to tell if someone is about to or has done something bad. David doesn't know what to think about the theory, or Elijah himself. However, events soon conspire to convince him he may be a superhero after all. — rmlohner