Why there really needs to be a remake of 'Unbreakable'

It's hard to believe now but there was a time when director M. Night Shyamalan was being hailed as the next Steven Spielberg. He's better known now for a brutal string of critical and commercial failures, the most recent of which -- After Earth -- may have irrevocably damaged Will Smith's standing as an A-list movie star.

The wunderkind behind The Sixth Sense has had diminishing returns with each new release, and yet he continues to arouse interest, if nothing else but because of the potential he once showed.

I recently did a revisit of one of his early cult hits, Unbreakable; a movie I mostly loved when it first came out but that was ruined for me with it's matter-of-fact title card ending.

Today, I think it would be an ideal movie to be remade because it has so many elements of greatness, but its execution is sorely lacking.

The movie came out in 2000, the year after The Sixth Sense became a surprise phenomenon and before the superhero movie boom was really in full swing. I think this hurt the movie in some major ways. First, I think audiences (and Shyamalan himself) were hoping for a repeat of The Sixth Sense. He had the same star (Bruce Willis), the same hushed (and I would argue, overly effected) dialogue, and the same eerie atmospherics. It also had a doozy of a twist ending, but one that inexplicably denies you a final act.

SPOILER ALERT: The movie reveals that Samuel L. Jackson's character -- who is obsessed with comic books -- has been causing tragic disasters in order to see if anyone emerges unscathed to be the superhero to his super-villain. We learn that he has found that man in Bruce Willis, who survived a train wreck he caused early in the film. This is a devastating, well-acted scene and could have led to some sort of confrontation, or dare I say it, action sequence.

Instead Willis' character walks away -- mortified. Now this ending could have still worked for me, it's arguably more realistic -- although the movie itself isn't really. The finale as is could have a certain dark quality to it, but then for God knows what reason Shyamalan sticks these hokey title cards on there to let you know Willis called the police and Jackson is in the nuthouse. Umm ok...

The movie was released by Touchstone (a.k.a. Disney) -- were they too afraid to have an ending where the bad guy sort of won? Perhaps, but that moment singlehandedly ruins a potentially fascinating film. I would also argue that Shyamalan's pacing doesn't do the material any favors either.

Bruce Willis in Unbreakable

I don't need movies to be fast-paced, some of my favorite movies ever are by most standards slow, but this material requires wit and humor and this movie is mostly devoid of that. Willis can be an effective leading man, but here he's drained of so much emotion he's almost comatose. Jackson fares better in his role but neither get enough screen time to really flesh out their characters much.

Instead, we're saddled with a poor man's Haley Joel Osment as a the requisite weepy kid -- who adds nothing to the movie but feeble attempts to pull on our heartstrings.

That said, there are some terrific sequences in the film. Shyamalan is not a great writer of dialogue but he knows how to stage suspense scenes with some real bite. And his concept, what if a superhero lived among us and he didn't even know it, is a grabber.

I just think it was the wrong time for this movie. Nowadays, virtually every weekend a new comic book franchise is launched, and this story could serve as an intriguing counterpoint to the pomp and circumstance of the Marvel universe. Typically great movies shouldn't be remade, and terrible ones almost never are, because who would waste the money.

Unbreakable falls into that middle ground. A story that could be exceptional and improved upon if the material is in the right hands. I don't know if it'll ever happen -- but it's been 15 years so I don't think it's too soon to remake this imperfect film.