Glass

photo courtesy of slashfilm.com

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

     Back in 2000, fresh off the success of The Sixth Sense, director M. Night Shyamalan created Unbreakable, a slow-burn superhero movie centering around the nearly immortal David Dunn (Bruce Willis) and his brilliant rival Elijah Prince/Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson). 16 years later, Shyamalan directed Split, a thriller about a sinister man (James McAvoy) with multiple personalities and supernatural abilities. In his new movie Glass, Shyamalan brings all three characters together for a final showdown.

     Many moviegoers are still hesitant to trust M. Night Shyamalan after some of his high-profile critical and commercial disasters (The Last Airbender, After Earth), but Glass is actually not half bad. It’s more like a third bad. Or, like both Unbreakable and Split, it’s anywhere from 60-80% cool and 20-40% disappointing and problematic.

photo courtesy of superherohype.com

     I imagine that most of the audience of this movie will be people who saw and liked Split. Unbreakable, now 19 years old, has a dedicated cult following, but it’s much less of people-pleaser. Where Split is tense, scary, and exciting, Unbreakable is slow, demanding, and a tad anticlimactic.

     The first half of Glass feels much more like Split. It’s promising, a bit creepy, and you feel like we’re building up—and boy, does it build up—to something fantastic. But somewhere around the two-thirds mark, the balance shifts in favor of Unbreakable, and Glass becomes something else entirely. All of the audience investment in the rising action is suddenly called into question, and it dawns on us: Shyamalan is going meta again.

photo courtesy of glassmovie.com

     You almost respect Shyamalan for subverting expectations, but when the entire third act abruptly shifts the established stakes, you can’t help but feel disappointed. The third act also forms the epicenter for one of Glass’s most regrettable tendencies: its propensity for overexplaining and overanalyzing what’s happening. After every few minutes of action, Shyamalan cuts to Samuel L. Jackson saying something about comic book tropes, and it never fails to distract and subtract from the story.

     Most confounding of all, the third act fails the movie’s most important question: why? Why is any of this happening? Why is there a sequel to Unbreakable in the first place? Why is McAvoy’s Kevin Crumb in that sequel? How is this the logical conclusion of the Split story? What possible relevance or significance to the Unbreakable story does Kevin Crumb have? What value does he add? We know these characters can collide; Shyamalan owns the rights to all of them and can do with them what he pleases. But Glass never gives us any indication why these things are happening or why we should believe them or care about them.

photo courtesy of gq.com

     Glass inherits some of Split’s baggage, too. The movie’s portrayal of mental illness is still troubling, for one, though admittedly Glass doesn’t invite that discussion into the forefront in the way Split does. And Shyamalan doesn’t seem to know how to integrate Split’s loose ends. Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy) returns for Glass, but her inclusion makes no sense.

     Now, despite everything I’ve just said, I have to admit: I actually really enjoyed the first two-thirds of this movie. I suspect that the audience will run out of patience (as I did), but I wouldn’t be surprised if some audience members find enough in the build-up to make Glass an overall positive experience. And the best part of that buildup? Samuel L. Jackson, easily. McAvoy’s seamless segues between 24 personalities may be the flashier performance, but Samuel L. Jackson is doing the much more complicated and interesting work here, and it’s him who makes the best parts of this movie—named for his character, after all—worth watching.

Glass is rated PG-13 for violence including some bloody images, thematic elements, and language.

TRAILER