Your bag is empty.
Glass is (one hopes) the last of M. Night Shyamalan’s run of superheroes-are-real thrillers. It’s also the least movie of the bunch.
I was reasonably OK with the bargain basement-budget, nutjob horror flick Split, hailed as the director’s comeback movie in 2016, in which James McAvoy gives an insanely unhinged, showboat performance as Kevin Wendell Crumb, a badly abused guy who protects his vulnerabilities by a slew of dissociative identity disorder-created defenders. I fully enjoyed the inspired ridiculousness of its predecessor Unbreakable, in which a wheelchair-bound, brittle-boned, often catatonic mastermind and mass murderer Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson in peak form as Mr. Glass) made such mayhem for stoic, reluctant superhero David Dunn (Bruce Willis), known as “The Overseer.” And way back when, who wasn’t taken with Shyamalan’s spooky supernatural tale The Sixth Sense, the 1999 freak hit that had critics comparing the writer-director to Hitchcock and Spielberg?
Glass is meant to be the crossover movie, the one that interlocks the films, cements the grand mosaic together. But though Shyamalan has given it a rich, strange, potentially juicy center, the story he’s chosen to wrap around it is a dry, hollowed-out shell.
The movie begins promisingly enough with security guard/vigilante Dunn tracking down Crumb and his 20-odd personae (a.k.a. ”The Horde”), who enjoyably terrorize Philadelphians. The fun stops when Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson, hamming it up while attempting to make the best of an implausible role) throws them into the psych ward of chillingly antiseptic Raven Hill Memorial Hospital, in which Price has been imprisoned for nearly two decades.
The movie just doesn’t move, despite a more-than-ready Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis.
Although visions of in-hospital carnage, freak-outs and mayhem may dance in our heads, what Shyamalan’s low-budget movie delivers are a series of seemingly endless psychotherapeutic gabfests and tiresome monologues by the doctor trying to persuade our guys into thinking they’re not all that, after all—just humans with delusions of superiority. But wait, didn’t the previous flicks show us that trio possessed indisputable larger-than-life powers and gifts the world just couldn’t handle?
Maddeningly, the movie just doesn’t move, despite a more-than-ready Jackson and Willis. Shyamalan burdens his cast with sometimes-cringeworthy dialogue meant to put over his promising but unfulfilled Themes and Ideas. The last half hour (no spoilers here!) is very busy and hectic, sometimes wonderfully conceived and shot, but sabotaged by a barrage of patented Shyamalan twists, each goofier and more eye-rolling than the last.
Gifted, frustrating, ornery Shyamalan is worthy of much better than what he’s inflicted upon himself here, let alone than what he’s inflicted on those of us pulling for him to be transcendent again. We’ll wait. But only for so long.