26 NOVEMBER, 2000: It’s going to be hard as hell to review “Unbreakable” with a clear conscience, because what I liked most about seeing this movie was that I didn’t know anything about it, and that it spun off in a direction that (shocker!) hadn’t been given away in the trailers (by the way, just to get something off my chest, I saw trailers this weekend for Billy Bob Thorton’s “All The Pretty Horses” and Robert Zemeckis’ “Cast Away” that left me wondering what the fuck could be in the movie that they didn’t already show me in the trailer. But I digress.). There’s a moment about forty-five minutes in where I realized what the rest of the movie was going to be about, and I couldn’t have been more pleased that I didn’t know beforehand.

And that’s all good and well. But what the hell do I write about now?

I’ll press on and do my best. “Unbreakable” is the new film from “Sixth Sense” writer/director M. Night Shyamalan, and in it he again shows a real talent for creating atmosphere and suspense mostly out of conversation, and for creating real human interest by showing how normal, everyday people would respond to the seemingly unbelievable. There is really something at stake in Shyamalan’s films because they’re not about plot, they’re about people; at their heart, they’re not thrillers, but character pieces.

Bruce Willis plays David Dunne, a Philadelphia security guard who miraculously survives a train derailment and collision that kills every other passenger. He doesn’t just survive, in fact—he walks away without a scratch, a detail that is of particular interest to Elijah Price (an excellent Samuel L. Jackson), a comic book collector. Price sees himself to be at the other end of the spectrum: since his birth, he has suffered from a disease that makes his bones so brittle that the slightest infraction breaks them.

That’s the premise. After that we get into the stuff that I was thankful I didn’t know, but I can say that throughout this intriguing set-up and through the unexpected turns of Shyamalan’s intelligent screenplay, he proves himself again as an accomplished, thoughtful filmmaker. He gives his audience a modicum of credit, taking his time telling the story, letting nothing come too easy. Some have complained that the film is too slow. Fuck ‘em. Go see “Charlie’s Angels” again.

His camerawork and compositions are particularly strong (watch how the first two scenes play out in almost unbroken takes; note my tremendous discipline in not making some bad pun with the title during that last sentence), the acting is thankfully understated and believable, and James Newton Howard’s score is spot-on throughout.

In “Unbreakable”, Shyamalan has created the most quietly involving film since—well, “The Sixth Sense”. Comparisons are going to be made, of course, to that earlier film, and I’m sure it won’t do half of that film’s box office, and some claim that its ending doesn’t work and seems a too-obvious attempt to replicate the effectiveness of Sixth’s. While Unbreakable’s ending doesn’t pack the purely emotional punch of its predecessor’s, it does have more high points throughout than the earlier film did. I only found fault with the last two, wrap-up titles—they take the film into a realm of cheesiness that until then has been avoided. Until then, however, “Unbreakable” is one of the year’s best films.

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I’m one of Spike Lee’s biggest fans. He is one of our most consistently interesting, prolific, experimental directors, and American film is lucky to have him. So no one’s more disappointed than I am that his new film, “Bamboozled”, has moments of greatness but is not a great film.

It’s certainly not for lack of trying. During this film and his last fiction feature, “Summer of Sam” (his concert documentary “The Original Kings Of Comedy” was released between them, and was one of my favorite movies of the summer), I found myself thinking, for the very first time, some of the things that I am constantly hearing and disregarding from Spike’s critics: He takes on too much. He’s too unfocused. He makes every point with a sledgehammer. He needs to learn how to write a third act.

Now, I’m not saying those are the last words on the film. I’m just saying they crossed my mind.

“Bamboozled” was shot on mini digital video, and amateur filmmakers the world over should be glad a major filmmaker chose to use the format on a fiction feature. How does it look? Well, the opening passages take some getting used to, but once you’re involved in the film, you pretty much forget about it. And you do get involved in the film—the first two-thirds of the movie are often excellent, electrifying cinema.

Spike takes on African-American images in pop culture through the story of Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans, in a mannered but effective performance), a Harvard-educated buppie and the only black executive at a struggling TV net-let, charged by his white b-boy boss (a pitch-perfect Michael Rappaport) to create shows that are “more black”. In an attempt to make a point (and, hopefully, get released from his contract), Delacroix deliberately creates the most offensive program he can—“Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show”, featuring two street performers (Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson), in “blacker face”, as a pair of shuckin’, jivin’, lazy, shiftless layabouts at an Alabama watermelon patch. And, since this is a satire, the show is of course a smash.

As I’ve mentioned, this stuff all works. Spike is a passionate, angry, fierce filmmaker, and he’s not afraid to name names, point fingers, and make his audience squirm, as we often do when these stereotypes are presented (not only in the program they’re creating, but in scores of old film clips). The middle section, where the effect of the show’s success is vividly seen, is effective if familiar.

It’s in the film’s last half-hour that he veers way off-course (and, let it also be said by someone who wouldn’t have done without one of “Malcolm X”’s 200 minutes that the film is a good twenty minutes too long). The sudden violence at the end of “Do The Right Thing” gave that film much of its power; “Bamboozled” is not so lucky. Right Thing’s violence was steadily built to, always quietly bubbling under the sunny surface; “Bamboozled”’s violence comes out of left field and feels as though Spike didn’t know how to end the film, so he had a lot of people get shot.

My friend Mike had trouble with the idea that an actual minstrel show would become a hit. I disagreed, because the film is set up as a satire, and comedic exaggeration is par for the course (the blacks-as-bufoons comedies of the WB and UPN may not be minstrel shows, Spike says, but they may as well be). But I understood his confusion, because the first two-thirds of the film is a stinging, harshly funny social satire, and the last third is an angry, brutal, reactionary social drama—too reminiscent of “Drop Squad”, a 1994 film that Spike executive-produced, about a buppie ad exec whose stereotypical campaigns cause him to be kidnapped and reprogrammed by a militant pride group. There is much to recommend in Lee’s challenging film, but he needed to pick a tone and settle on it. Tone is a precarious thing in satire, and “Bamboozled”’s own overreaching ambitions ultimately do it in.