Glass

Year: 2019

Type: Horror/Drama

Stars: Burce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sarah Paulson, Spencer Treat Clark, Charlayne Woodard, Luke Kirby, Adam David Thompson, Shannon Destiny Ryan, Diana Silvers, Nina Wisner, Kyli Zion, M. Night Shymalan

Directed: M. Night Shymalan

Production: Blumhouse Productions

Ever since M. Night Shyamalan has been marketing himself as the next Hitchcock via an amped-up game of peek-a-boo somehow sold as the most audacious horror thriller in a generation, he’s been trying and failing to live up to the hype. Disaster after filmic disaster re-casted the ambitious filmmaker as a charlatan - a man whose outsized notions of what film could or should be, served as a cautionary tale for all those who have a premise but little else. Then in early 2017 he pulled off a Hail Mary with the gutsy if misguided Split which reclaimed the attention of audiences and critics alike. The twist - the only good movie in his repertoire that could arguably yield a sequel/franchise received one and we were none-the-wiser until the very end.

I see bad movies...

Glass is a continuation of what’s become known as the Unbreakable (2000) expanded universe. In it David Dunn (Willis), Philadelphia’s resident vigilante is forced to face off against James McAvoy’s one-man play The Horde the villain/protagonist of the aforementioned Split. This is of course thanks to the machinations of revealed Unbreakable villain Elijah Glass (Jackson) who in the long years since his run-ins with Dunn has turned into a super smart supervillain (apparently).

Now this in itself would have made a decent enough movie. Maybe not great but the promise of having McAvoy’s twenty or so personalities getting their clock cleaned by David “I survived a train crash ergo I’m a super hero” Dunn seems like a lot of fun. Unfortunately Shyamalan felt it was necessary to bog down his verdant premise with mountains of back-logged lore and hastily executed retcons. To top it off, you remember the worst parts of Split; the excessive psychology mumbo-jumbo that’s excised from seemingly minor characters paragraph after painstaking paragraph? Oh that’s all in there, but to make doubly sure that Glass is a drag, Shymalan threw in a metric ton of navel-gazing meta-narrative having to do with heroes and journeys and heroes on journeys that commits the rare feat of talking down to and talking over the heads of the audience.

Much like Split, Glass takes place almost entirely in one place, in this case a private wing of a psychiatric ward. Sarah Paulson co-stars as a mysterious psychiatrist who, according to her and the trailer, “specializes in patients who think they are superheroes.” She then spends the better part of the movie trying to convince the principle three that all they think they do is just a delusion – a goal that is somehow reinforced by the fact that they’re put in specialized cages hereto not seen since the last X-Men movie?

We're not saying we believe you but we have removed the silverware...

The presumed reason Paulson is a factor at all is to seed moments of doubt for Dunn and Kevin (aka the Horde aka Patricia, Hedwig, The Beast, Scrappy-Doo) so they have something character-wise to overcome. In the first scene she and the other three are in a room, she spends what seems like hours shooting down their egos and whataboutisms.  But since the audience knows the movie has to be headed somewhere her monologues serve only to stall. Granted she does a better job regurgitating expository dialogue than the therapist in Split or god-forbid Shyamalan himself in The Village (2004), but it still feels wooden, overwritten and ultimately moot.

The real, real reason she’s there however is to serve as connective tissue between Dunn, Glass and the Horde as to hide the fact that Glass didn’t have the budget to keep Willis or Jackson for more than a few days. This is most obvious when the cinematographer opts to go back and forth with the camera when there are two people in a room together. This is instead of taking the time to light a good ol’ fashion shot reverse shot. Arguably this could have been done for aesthetic purposes but had that been the case than arguably the same would have been done when Paulson is, say, talking to Spencer Treat Clark, Anya Taylor-Joy, Luke Kirby or any of the other people she talks and talk and talks to.

The rest of the cast just seem to orbit around her, each getting about fifteen minutes of screen time a piece. Willis, the man who is actually called the “reluctant hero” out loud on screen seems so emotionally checked out of this film as to look catatonic. Between him and Jackson actually pretending to be catatonic, much of the heavy lifting is done by McAvoy who struggles to maintain the lightning in the bottle performance he first honed in Split. Part of the problem might be he doesn’t have Taylor-Joy to bounce off of on a regular basis. But part of it might be the novelty of having an actor play someone with dissociative identify disorder - or rather a movie version thereof, is just not there anymore.

Sorry, just daydreaming of being in a better movie...

There are small signs of life in this movie. Clever little moments of ratcheting up tension make for a few key moments of ghoulish fun. Luke Kirby and Adam David Thompson stand out as a pair of dimwitted psych ward helpers who find themselves caught up in all the superhero melodrama. They along with a menagerie of would be “Beast” victims are the only things that pass for human in a movie filled with walking deconstructions that speak poetically about capes, masks and outer underwear.

Actually come to think of it there was a guy early on in Dunn’s security hardware store that looked like he knew what he was doing. That guy will be going places!

Yeah! That guy!

Final Grade: F