Glass

Dir. M. Night Shyamalan

Glass is the final chapter to a trilogy almost two decades in the making. Audiences were shocked when surprise hit Split ended up being an unannounced sequel to 2000’s Unbreakable, but this time we were all on the edge for the alleged climactic end to the story of David Dunn, The Beast, and Mr. Glass. The problem with this film is it doesn’t have a lot of climax. It feels as though so much effort was put into subverting genre expectations in this film, it didn’t meet any expectations at all. The movie instead kind of aimlessly moves from scene to scene, leaving me checking the time an hour into the film wondering when the movie was going to get started.

I went into Glass as a very big fan of Split but not as much of Unbreakable. I thought Unbreakable had an interesting concept but with a flawed execution that dragged from slow paced into boring. By contrast, Split kept me on the edge of my seat. The performances were excellent, the pace quick, and the mysteries behind each character were intriguing. Unfortunately, Glass does not take after Split in any of those regards. At this point in the film series, we know that it’s a superhero movie. We know who all are main players are and the trailer has told us to expect the Final Battle. Yet for more than an hour of this movie, we are told that “superheroes don’t exist”, “everything you’ve seen can be explained by science”, and essentially that we’re all participating in a mass delusion. There’s absolutely nothing riveting about being told over and over again that the sky isn’t blue only to go “SURPRISE. IT IS BLUE!”. Yes. I knew that.

There’s a big reveal about Sarah Paulson’s character towards the end of the movie but because it is the literal end of the film, there isn’t really much you can do with that information. This movie leaves you with a lot of “now what?” moments. If this is the final movie in the series, then all these new Shyamalan brand twists are just plot threads being left to go nowhere. The ending of this movie also reeked of something that was written in 2000. No spoilers, but it involves information being leaked on to the internet that would’ve been shocking before the age of photoshop and video editing but is decidedly less so now.

The performances are as good as I expected (or as robotic as I expected in Bruce Willis’ case) but the actors really just made the most of what they were given considering the lack of character arc for most of them. Bruce Willis is stoic to a fault, David Dunn appearing to be exactly the same as he was in the first film with no evidence of 19 years of growth as a person and as a hero. Joseph Dunn is all grown up and working as his father’s Man in the Chair, shouting helpful sounding things into an ear piece, but absolutely no other information about him is given. His entire existence seems to be based around his father; the doe-eyed worship cute in a 10 year old but a bit sad in a grown man. James McAvoy is as excellent as he was in Split (and I was weirdly happy to see Patricia again- like she was a long lost insane relative), but again we didn’t get to see much growth from any of his assorted characters except perhaps Kevin who spent a bit more time in the light this go around. There’s a very interesting subplot of the Horde beginning to lose faith in the Religion of the Beast but it isn’t really given time to develop into anything extraordinary. Instead that time is wasted on pushing James McAvoy into doing so many different identities it just becomes gimmicky. We see each new identity for probably less than a minute, clearly just to make a cool montage than do anything useful in the story.

In my opinion the best performance was clearly given by Mr. Samuel L Jackson as the formidable Mr. Glass. The most upsetting part was that there wasn’t enough of it! He spends a good chunk of the movie in a sedated state, staring dead-eyed into the camera with some occasional face twitches. When the movie finally gets rolling (30 minutes before the end), and we get the Mr. Glass supervillain we were promised, he’s fun and menacing to watch. How did he get that bright purple suit when he was last seen in hospital scrubs? Who knows. But what is a comic book villain without the proper brightly colored attire? As fun as he is though, he also suffers from the same narrative time-stop as David Dunn. He’s been imprisoned for almost two decades and this was his plan? This movie could just have easily taken place 2 years after Unbreakable for how little he matured. For one of the most dangerous minds on the earth, his plan was quite simple and seemed to hinge entirely on the Beast. Was he planning to spend another 20 years in that hospital room if no other super being emerged?

Additionally, this may be a quibble, but there’s quite literally about 3-5 sets. The story was so minimal and self-contained that I got into a solid argument with myself during the film about whether there was a supposed narrative reason or if the budget was just literally 47 cents. I’m leaning towards the budget going almost entirely towards paychecks with none left over for locations or even more interesting camera set ups. M. Night teases you with the possibility of escaping this hospital only for the grand battle to literally go down in a parking lot while the glorious promise of a public stand off CGI glitters in the distance. I understand subversion of the typical superhero movie ending battle, but the subversion should still leave me with something interesting. Instead I got a WorldStar fight video in a parking lot between a buff for his age old guy in a rain jacket and what appears to be a skinhead running on all fours.

Glass was a disappointment. Despite my general apathy to Unbreakable, I enjoyed Split in a truly unexpected way that got me incredibly excited for what was supposed to be a grand finale. I’d hoped that in the same way James Mangold took the story of Wolverine and transformed it into a western with claws, M. Night Shyamalan could create a superhero film that transcended the perceived limitations of the genre and explore new avenues. Instead he worked so hard to prove it was Not A Typical Superhero Movie, he sucked all the fun out of it too. The movie attempts to cinematically gaslight the audience into thinking it isn’t the kind of movie we already know it is, it tries to make it a conspiracy story at a point where it is far too late to matter, but worst of all it had the opportunity to fill Twenty years of character backstory and it chose to ignore it completely. Like the neopet you forgot about, the movie expects these characters to be right where it left them- unchanged, unmotivated, and sadly, uninteresting.