Mark Reviews Movies: GLASS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 17, 2019

There's a word that keeps coming to mind when thinking about Glass: betrayal. That word might seem overdramatic or angry, but in the context of considering writer/director M. Night Shyamalan's latest movie, it's not intended to be either of those. It's simply a statement of how far gone Shyamalan has become as a filmmaker in the 19 years between Unbreakable and this sequel. In the days of the previous film, Shyamalan had a great idea and the skills to run with it. With this one, he still has the skills, but the ideas have run quite thin.

The 2000 film was a low-key, almost naturalistic examination of what it would be like if a superhero actually appeared in the real world. It wasn't revolutionary at the time, although it certainly seems that way today, given how the film arrived just before the influx of superhero movies, as well as how its approach seemed to subvert expectations and clichés that hadn't yet been established. The filmmaker's latest, which is also a sequel to the troublesome Split, sets out to further subvert our superhero expectations, but it just ends up undermining the great conceit of the first film in what is now, retroactively, a trilogy.

The age-old wisdom is to leave good enough alone, and it's a lesson that Shyamalan probably should have heeded. That's not to say the story of David Dunn (Bruce Willis), the unbreakable man of the earlier film, couldn't or shouldn't have continued. Indeed, the first act of this movie displays some promise by showing us how David's crime-fighting crusade has progressed 19 years after he discovered that he had superpowers.

He now runs with a home security company with his now-adult son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark). David's wife died five years ago, and when he isn't at legitimate or vigilante work for people's protection, he returns to an empty home, wallowing in the past.

There's a new threat in Philadelphia—a serial killer known only as "the Horde." Those who recall Shyamalan's previous movie know that the killer is actually Kevin (James McAvoy), a man who suffers from dissociative identity disorder and possesses over 20 distinct personalities, including a monster known as "the Beast." David, in his signature rain poncho "costume," tracks down Kevin, who has abducted four teenage girls and transformed into the Beast.

Their big fight is interrupted by the police and Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson). The doctor has the two sent to a psychiatric facility, where she hopes to cure them of what she believes to be delusions of being akin to comic-book characters.

Also at the facility is Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), David's old, secret archnemesis, who remains under heavy sedation because of previous escape attempts. Staple knows of a procedure that might cure all three of them, and she has three days to do so without resorting to laser-based brain surgery.

After the initial re-introduction of David's character, the screenplay offers only one new idea, and it's the possibility that these three men are delusional—that their seemingly extraordinary abilities can be explained away with pesky, ordinary facts. The issue, of course, is that it's almost a complete certainty that Shyamalan, as tricky as he may be as a storyteller, wouldn't toss aside the superhero/supervillain conceit that brought us to this belated sequel in the first place.

The potential tension and ideas behind this possibility, then, are basically rendered into nothing. We wait for the inevitable, and in the meantime, Shyamalan treats us to a redundant reiteration of the main characters' primary traits, with scenes of Elijah planning a scheme to escape and cause chaos again. Kevin and his multiple personalities receive, perhaps, the most focus, while David is left to wait to do something.

Nothing new or of much interest happens until the story's extended climax, which promises a big showdown set at a major building, established repeatedly throughout the movie, but instead gets demoted to a parking lot. Since it's Shyamalan at the helm, we expect a twist to redefine everything that has come before the finale. Seemingly aware of this predictable quality, the filmmaker instead gives us at least three different twists, each one laboriously revealed and less impressive than the previous, unimpressive one. The sum total of those twists doesn't so much redefine everything as it makes the thrust of the story and even the main characters irrelevant. Again, sometimes it's best to leave good enough—or, in this case, bad enough—alone.

Yes, saying so might seem like an exaggeration, but nonetheless, Glass feels like a betrayal. The movie takes what might be Shyamalan's best, most ingenious idea over the course of his career and transforms it into the convoluted and unnecessary creation of a hollow, predictable mythos.

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