Glass: The Shyamalan Renaissance Was Nice While It Lasted

In 2017, M. Night Shyamalan released Split, a movie heralded by critics and audiences alike as a return to form for the once-promising auteur after spending the better half of two decades as one of the worst major filmmakers in Hollywood. Although Split was mostly decent, carried almost entirely by a phenomenal performance from James McAvoy, it was easy to see why it got so overhyped considering his last few movies included The Visit, After Earth and The Last Airbender. The big plot twist was that it was actually a sequel to Unbreakable, foreshadowing a showdown between the villain of the former and the hero of the latter. And the big plot twist of Glass, the leadup to that showdown, is that M. Night Shyamalan and Blumhouse saw the mad ducketts Marvel was making and thought “I gotta get me a piece of that superhero pie.”

Our story follows three main characters: David Gunn (Bruce Willis), a vigilante with superhuman strength known to the public as The Overseer, Kevin (James McAvoy), a man whose body is occupied by multiple personalities who are all at the whim of a dominant personality called “The Beast”, and Elijah (Samuel L. Jackson), a comic book obsessed hyper-intelligent mastermind with brittle bones who believes superheroes should be real and unlocked David’s powers by making him the sole survivor of a train crash. All three are being detained in a psychiatric hospital under the supervision of a psychiatrist (Sarah Paulson) who specializes in people who believe they’re superheroes. She’s been given three days to convince them their abilities are all just delusions of grandeur by any means necessary, so Elijah stages a breakout while also setting up the field for a showdown between David and Kevin.

While Unbreakable and Split were enjoyable in their own right, Glass practically requires that you see both in order for any of it to make a lick of sense, and even then, the plot is still a confusing mess of weird character moments and baffling decisions. The film is marred by the typical laundry list of M. Night Shyamalan’s shortcomings, even when he’s at his best: it’s too long, there are serious pacing issues, stilted dialogue, weird camera tricks that I’m sure sounded better on paper, and the more it wants you to take it seriously, the harder it is to do so. Since this is a Blumhouse production with half of its already tiny budget going to two of its main leads, they work around this by setting the film primarily in the hospital, a low-rent Arkham Asylum where the bulk of the story is conveyed through therapy sessions and our ticking clock taking the form of a laser lobotomy.

Glass seems to be aiming for a deconstructionist angle of the superhero genre in the vein of Watchmen or Super, but weirdly enough, the movie this ended up reminding me of the most was Lady in the Water. Now, this is nowhere near as bad as Lady in the Water, simply because Glass doesn’t actively hate you. But both are meta narratives about the nature of creativity and storytelling, particularly the stories we tell ourselves and how they shape our perception of reality. The only difference is that while Lady in the Water conveyed this by casting the director as a self-help author whose writing will change the world and having one of his critics get eaten by a monster, Glass does similar levels of self-aggrandizing at the expense of contradicting itself. One of the main points of Unbreakable was that a real-life superhero/villain fight would need to be from people with unstable flights of fancy, and while it seems like its continuing that sentiment at first, it changes its mind halfway through and decides that the world isn’t ready or able to comprehend the existence of these superpowered beings. And even then, a lot of that commentary is delivered through Samuel L. Jackson waxing rhapsodic about the nature of comic book narratives.

Ultimately, it feels like a movie that was designed to let you down. It promises a big showdown at the tallest tower in Philadelphia (it’s an M. Night Shyamalan movie, of course it’s set in Philly), but ends up having it in the psych ward’s parking lot. This isn’t helped by the fact that it rolls over and falls asleep before the big climax, only to shake itself awake and cough up not one, not two, but three plot twists, one of which is foreshadowed by two subplots of David’s son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark) and Kevin’s last kidnapping victim Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) trying to prove their innocence by doing research on comic books, and the other two feel less like twists and more like the setup for a franchise. Maybe the drudging setup and obtuse is there to shine a light on the ubiquity of superhero films, the absurdity of overanalyzing them, and their incessant need for a satisfying ending. Or maybe it’s just bad writing.

Bottom line, Glass has more than a few cracks in it. While the previous two installments hold up on their own merits, this tacked on attempt at a long-running trilogy only serves to muddy things further. It’s a pretty simple story that’s made convoluted and confusing the more it tries to explain itself. Either way, if this is somehow going to pave the way for an M. Night Cinematic Universe, then count me out.

5/10