His new film has been marketed by Disney with a shrewd salesmanship that itself borders on the mystical. The trailers show Bruce Willis in a hospital, speaking with a doctor who tells him that a) he has been in a disastrous train wreck, b) he is the only survivor and c) he doesn’t have a scratch on him. Cut to a sullen, shrunken-looking Samuel L. Jackson, who asks him if he’s ready for the truth. And that’s it, a huge opening weekend thus assured.

The film's first few reels flesh things out a little bit, with the revelation that Jackson’s character was born with a severe bone disorder that left him brittle and forever vulnerable. He immersed himself in comic books, a world of superheroes and outsized struggless, and opened a comic book art gallery that caters solely to the over-18 crowd. He may be a little crazy -- he believes that comic book stories are the vestigial traces of a forgotten human mythology, and that Willis’s character may be a sort of unscratchable superhero with the duty of protecting mankind.

Willis dismisses this as psycho talk, but privately gives the theory some credence. There seem to be holes in Jackson’s scenario, such as the car accident 12 years ago that stripped Willis of his status as a star football player (and cemented his now-flagging relationship with his football-phobic wife). But Willis tries to remember the last time he was sick, and can’t. The conflict between his knowledge of the rational world and his suspicion that he’s been gifted with supernatural talents drives most of the film.

And there’s the problem with Shyamalan’s approach. We’re made to identify with the protagonist, experiencing events through his eyes, but key bits of information that should be available to him are kept hidden from us. Shyamalan justifies that narrative trick here, as in the last film, by positing that Willis is in deep denial of the true circumstances of his nature. Still, the scene where he queries his wife on his medical history is just bogus. If you had never been sick in your entire life, wouldn’t you notice? Isn’t this the kind of thing that couples talk about over the course of a dozen years?

Of course movies (and comic books) regularly get away with egregious lapses in logic, but the snail’s pace of Shyamalan’s storytelling leaves a little too much time to contemplate the proceedings. Shyamalan withholds crucial insight until he’s good and ready to dole it out, but the behavior of his characters doesn’t always jibe with the new data. This is storytelling by obfuscation.

However, Shyamalan does manage to pepper the film with terrific scenes that work regardless of the story’s convolutions. The film’s brief action sequence is viscerally exciting, darkly funny, and utterly grim all at the same time, which is quite a feat, and the dynamic between a father and a son who thinks dad may be a superhero is pretty well handled. To boot, Shyamalan has an affection for grisliness that suits his fairy tales well. I just wish he’d develop a looser sense of humor to go along with the heavy stuff.

Visually, he’s stuck in a rut. Much of Unbreakable takes place in a flat-blue, nearly monochromatic space, until one color or another screams across the screen. His affection for the slow zoom and the long master shot do wonders for atmosphere, but the technique is repetitive and numbing. By the halfway point, you just want to send 50,000 volts through this picture, hoping to make it kick.

So I think Shyamalan screws up in a lot of ways, but he also distinguishes himself in an important sense. His films are more deeply flawed, but also leagues more interesting, than similarly high grossing product from well-regarded Hollywood hacks. Should his sense of narrative and characterization ever reach maturity -- that is, if he yokes his distinctive style to something beyond contrivance and atmosphere -- watch out.