Shyamalan Contemplates Unbreakable 2

So I think we can all agree that M. Night Shyamalan’s movies have not all been as successful as The 6th Sense. And his last offering, The Happening, was pretty much dreadful. However, I still have faith in Shyamalan. I stood by him with The Village, and I defended the artistry of Lady in the Water. But my favorite Shyamalan movie is Unbreakable. I know it wasn’t a huge success at the box office, but I think it was his best script so far, and it had more emotional depth than The 6th Sense. Well, Shyamalan told MTV news last week that he might be contemplating a return to the story of the physical and ideological opposites Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) and David Dunn (Bruce Willis).

Originally, Shyamalan had planned Unbreakable as a three-part story, but once he got to writing it, he realized that the first part (the origin story) was a whole movie on its own, so he never really got to the other two parts that he was planning. He says in the MTV article that while filming Unbreakable he talked with Jackson about where his character would go in the sequel if it ever got that far. And Jackson has expressed interest in working with Shyamalan again.

I, for one, would be extremely excited to see Shyamalan return to his glory days with some of the most excellent characters he has created so far. I think he’s extremely misunderstood as a filmmaker and the studios tend to market his movies in completely the wrong way (i.e., both Lady in the Water and The Village were marketed as “horror” movies, which—as anyone who has seen them can tell you—they are not). To me Shyamalan is an art-house, inde filmmaker trapped in the body of a blockbuster director. It’s too bad he was reduced to dwindling on the gratuitous bullet wounds of victims in The Happening in order to seem more “horror.”

I’m also looking forward to Shyamalan’s next project, a live-action screen adaptation of the popular cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender. I hope, when he is working with material that is not his own, he can finally hit one out of the park and prove to audiences and the studios that he is the great director he proved he could be with The 6th Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs.

What do you think of Shyamalan’s moives? Do you want to see Unbreakable 2? Leave a comment.