Movie Review: Glass

Glass ** ½ / *****

Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan.

Written by: M. Night Shyamalan.

Starring: Samuel L. Jackson (Elijah Price / Mr. Glass), Bruce Willis (David Dunn), James McAvoy (Kevin Wendell Crumb / The Beast / Patricia / Dennis / Hedwig / Barry / Jade / Orwell / Heinrich / Norma), Sarah Paulson (Dr. Ellie Staple), Anya Taylor-Joy (Casey Cooke), Luke Kirby (Pierce), Spencer Treat Clark (Joseph Dunn), Marisa Brown (Carol), Charlayne Woodard (Elijah's Mother).

 

I remember seeing Unbreakable in the fall of 2000, and absolutely loving it. I had liked The Sixth Sense, which was the biggest film of the previous year and had made director M. Night Shyamalan into a household name (even a Time Magazine cover asking if he was the next Spielberg – spoiler alert, he wasn’t) – but it was Unbreakable that I thought was Shyamalan’s truly great film – and as much as I liked his follow-up Signs, Unbreakable remains his best film, all these years later. It wasn’t the commercial hit that the films on either side of it were, which is why we didn’t get the sequels he talked about to it for more than 15 years. But Unbreakable was ahead of its time – released just a few months after the first X-Men movie – which really was the start of this glut of superhero cinema that has lasted ever since – Unbreakable took that same basic logic seriously, and told a great origin story – and did so on a realistic scale. When he finally made his sequel – Split – 16 years later, no one even knew it was a sequel to Unbreakable until they walked out of the theater after the last scene when it was revealed they took place in the same universe. Split is an odd movie – but one that has grown on me each time I’ve seen it (which is three times now) – and while it doesn’t come close to matching Unbreakable, it is an entertaining film, and watching the two films on back-to-back days’ emphasis the ways in which they are similar. Split was made as kind of a comeback vehicle for Shyamalan – who has been on a long career slide since The Village (2004), as he increasingly either tried to continue his thrillers with shocking twist endings that got progressively dumber (The Happening), or tried films completely outside of that realm – The Last Airbender, After Earth – that felt lifeless and dull. Even if I admire his ever strange The Lady in the Water (2006) – which I think marked the point-of-no-return for Shyamalan as a critical favorite, it was hard to defend much of his output since then. The low budget The Visit (2015) was fine, in its way, and showed he could make a low-key hit again – and then Split (2016) – made for a fraction of the budget that Unbreakable was proved it. Which is why he was given more money and more freedom to make Glass – only to have it blow up in his face again. The film doesn’t really work, and it doesn’t really work in the same way those films after Signs didn’t work – because Shyamalan the writer is so focused on shocking the audience in the final few moments of the film, that he forgets to make the rest of the film as interesting as it should be. There are fascinating ideas all throughout Glass that are either repeated ad nausea or ignored. And the ending isn’t even that shocking. There is a reason why the shock twist endings in cinema that become legendary (The Usual Suspects, and yes, The Sixth Sense) – and that’s because they are really hard to do well. And Shyamalan keeps on trying to do it again and again and again. It’s frustrating, because Shyamalan the director always shows real talent – real skill, real style – but he’s always let down by the screenplays.

 

Anyway, the story in Glass brings together the two main characters from Unbreakable with the main character from Split. David Dunn (Bruce Willis) has continued to be a low-key superhero ever since the Unbreakable days – except now, with the emergence of The Horde aka Kevin Wendell Crumb aka 22 other names (James McAvoy), he finally has an opponent worthy of him. As the trailer makes clear though – they will not be fighting each other for very long in the outside world. That’s because after their first fight, they are both arrested and brought to the same mental hospital that has housed Elijah Price aka Mr. Glass) since Unbreakable. Their doctor, Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) spends much of her time trying to convince all three of them that there is nothing special about them – they are not “super humans” in any way. Each of the three of them have someone on the outside though still in their corner – Dunn has his son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark), Elijah has his mother (Charlayne Woodard) and strangely, Kevin has Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy) – the lone survivor from the trio of girls Kevin kidnapped and murdered (and apparently, like a month ago, in this timeline – and he's done it twice since).

 

It's an odd choice to spend so much of the runtime of glass with Sarah Paulson’s character question the superhuman attributes of Dunn and Crumb – since we already spent two whole movies, one with each of them, where they – you know, proved they were superhuman. I think in many ways, Shyamalan just liked the idea of having the trio of them in a mental hospital together so he could underline the basic metaphor for the trio of character as Id, Ego and Super Ego, but that’s pretty apparent even without all the psychobabble. There is also a lot of energy spent on a light that allows people to control when Kevin switches identities, and a lot of talk about a new intelligent skyscraper in Philadelphia – and neither really lead anywhere (the skyscraper is especially problematic – and it’s all one big tease).

 

As for the performances, you have to hand it to McAvoy – he goes for it completely, at the risk of looking like a complete idiot half the time, but he is committed. This performance worked better in Split – when it had more time to cycle through the different characters (and a lot less time as The Beast), but he’s giving it his all every second of the movie. On the complete other end of the spectrum is Bruce Willis, who I’m pretty sure they had to poke with a stick before every take just to keep him awake. Around the time of his first two films with Shyamalan, Willis started to really underplay his roles – trying, probably, for subtly – in ways that worked wonders for both The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. He’s kept it going now for 20 years though, and often it doesn’t work anymore. In some ways, he’s like the opposite of Nicolas Cage – who goes berserk and over-the-top in every movie, and when it’s warranted (like last year’s Mandy), it works, but when it doesn’t, it really doesn’t. And at least in Cage’s movies, he isn’t in danger of lulling you to sleep like Willis is. The best performance in the movie is clearly by Samuel L. Jackson, who has a strange ability to take his dialogue – much of which is just speech after speech about how comic books work (we get it), and make it interesting. Since the movie was called Glass, I expected it to be all about him – and sadly it wasn’t. The biggest disappointment is that Shyamalan doesn’t seem to know what to do with Anya Taylor-Joy’s Casey – who emerged from Split the film’s most interest and complex character (and probably the most complex female character in any Shyamalan movie – although that’s not much of a horse race) so the talented Taylor-Joy is pretty much wasted her  - but at least she doesn’t look silly in old age makeup like poor Charlayne Woodard, who they had to age because they cast her to play Elijah’s mother when he was a boy in flashbacks in Unbreakable – and now the 65-year old actress has to play the 70 year old Jackson’s mother.

 

All of this probably makes it sound like I hated Glass – and I didn’t. I find it hard to completely hate any of Shyamalan’s movies (save for The Last Airbender and After Earth) – because for the most part, he makes thrillers with good style, and some interesting ideas. He doesn’t seem to really know how to follow through on many of those ideas though, and he has some incredibly ham-fisted and downright bad dialogue throughout all of his movies. That’s what makes films like The Village, The Happening, The Lady in the Water or this so disappointing. It’s not that they’re bad – it’s that you can see what they could have been if only Shyamalan would have just explained his idea to a good screenwriter and then let them write the screenplay instead of him. Glass is an ambitious, idea filled superhero move in an era with a lot of superhero films, but too few ideas. The fact that it’s less satisfying a movie going experience than Aquaman is a massive disappointment.