Too many films are ruined by the amount of the storyline given away in their trailers.  The new preview for Tom Hanks’ Castaway shows his character involved in an airplane disaster, stranded on a desert island, and then returning home to his wife, who spent the last four years thinking he was dead.  Thanks – you just saved me eight bucks.

Unbreakable is one of the rare examples of a film’s trailer showing just enough to keep you interested.  It looked like it might be another story about a mystical Negro sent to help the white man figure out the meaning of life (like The Green Mile and The Legend of Bagger Vance), but Unbreakable had me fooled from the very first frame – a title card delivering statistics about the popularity of comic books, of all things.

Bruce Willis (Disney’s The Kid) stars as David Dunne, a broken-down Philadelphia security guard with a failing marriage to his college sweetheart (Robin Wright Penn, Message in a Bottle).  Hoping to leave his past behind, David goes to New York City for a job interview, but his train is involved in a major accident on the way home.  Every other passenger dies, but David emerges without a single scratch.

After attending a memorial service for the victims of the wreck, David finds a strange note on the windshield of his truck.  It reads, “How many days of your life have you been sick?”  David, who suddenly realizes he’s never been ill, traces the note back to Limited Edition, a gallery specializing in comic book art that is run by Elijah Price  (Samuel L. Jackson, Shaft).  Elijah, the victim of a genetic disease that causes his bones to be extremely brittle, believes David might be a modern superhero capable of withstanding tremendous physical trauma that would crush an ordinary man.

So David is virtually indestructible and Elijah can snap like a twig without warning.  They sound like an Odd Couple-esque duo that could run around the city and fight crime, or battle some crazy terrorist (like these two actors did in Die Hard With a Vengeance), but Unbreakable doesn’t take that path.  To reveal the path it does take would ruin the little surprises that brilliantly unfold throughout the film.

With this follow-up to the critically acclaimed box office hit The Sixth Sense, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan almost places himself in the same league as a Quentin Tarantino, or a P.T. Anderson.  While there are a few problems with Shyamalan’s script, his direction is one of the year’s best.  Like Sense, nobody speaks much above a whisper, which gives the film an eerie, dream-like quality and makes the characters seem like they’re sleepwalking through their lives.  Using interesting camera placement and angles, as well as cinematographer Eduardo Serra’s (What Dreams May Come) drab, muted colors, Shyamalan is able to match, if not best, the overall level of creepiness he created in Sense.  James Newton Howard returns from Sense to provide another spooky score.

Willis does an even better job in Unbreakable, too.  His performance is just as important to the film as Shyamalan’s direction.  He does have to share a bunch of screen time with a kid again (here it’s Gladiator’s Spencer Treat Clark, who plays David’s son).  Shyamalan has a cameo as a drug pusher in one scene (he also played in doctor in Sense).

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for adult language and violence