Glass (2019)
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Written by M. Night Shyamalan
Starring Bruce Willis, James McAvoy, Samuel L. Jackson, Anya Taylor Joy, Sarah Paulson
Release Date January 18th, 2019
Published January 17th, 2019
As the biggest fan on the planet of M Night Shyamalan’s Split, I had a bias in favor of Glass. I was deeply excited for this sequel to two movies that I absolutely adored in Unbreakable and Split. So, for me to say that Glass is a bizarre, cheap, sloppy mess of a movie is really saying something. I tried to like this movie, I attempted to will Glass into being a good movie. I tried to rationalize it into working as a narrative. Nothing I tried worked as my logical brain overwhelmed my fanboy instinct, forcing this admission: Glass is terrible.
Glass picks up the story of Unbreakable and Split in the wake of the revelation that the two are in the same universe. David Dunn (Bruce Willis) has been fighting evil since the day he sent Elijah Price, aka Mr. Glass (Samuel L Jackson) to prison for his terrorist acts. Using his super strength and extra-sensory perception, David has turned his attention to The Horde, the name given to the multiple personalities of Kevin (James McAvoy).
The Beast, Kevin’s most violent and dangerous alter-ego, has been feeding on those who he believes have never felt real pain. He’s murdered several more teenagers in the time since we met him in Split but finally, David Dunn, known in the media as ‘The Overseer,’ for reasons never determined, has a lead on The Horde. David has tracked Kevin's location with the help of his son, Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark), to an empty factory in Philadelphia.
The confrontation between David and The Beast is cut short by the arrival of police and a doctor, Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson). How did the police find them? Your guess is as good as the movie’s guess, as the movie offers no notion of how the police got there. How they got there with the one doctor in the world who has created a machine that can stop the superhuman qualities of Kevin and David, even though they had no idea where or who they were, is one of many contrivances of the idiot plot of Glass.
David and Kevin are taken to a psychiatric hospital where, waiting for them, unwittingly, is Mr. Glass. It seems that Dr. Staple has a very particular specialty: people who believe they are superheroes. She believes that the three men are delusional and sets out to prove to them their seemingly superhuman abilities can be explained through science. Naturally, Elijah Price, the ultimate ‘True Believer’ won’t be easily convinced.
The trailer for Glass spoils the fact that Mr. Glass and The Horde/Kevin become a team and that David and The Beast will go head to head in the yard of the hospital. One thing the trailer doesn’t tell you is how cheap and unfocused these scenes are. The final act of Glass is reminiscent of Shyamalan’s The Village, a film where the final act completely destroys what was not a bad movie until that point. Glass is bad throughout but the final fight does manage to make things worse.
Glass isn’t that bad headed to the third act, it's relatively watchable, and then things go completely off the rails. In his attempt to recapture past glory as the king of the ‘Twist,’ director M. Night Shyamalan packs a ludicrous number of twists into the third act of Glass. There are so many twists at the end of Glass that it becomes downright exhausting. It’s as if Shyamalan was so desperate to fool us that he hedged his bets and put in as much craziness as he could think of in order to convince us that at least one of these twists would legitimately surprise us.
I mentioned that Glass was cheap and boy howdy, for a movie that is a sequel to a pair of blockbusters, this movie looks as if it were a Sweded version of a sequel to two blockbusters. Glass has one location for the most part and while it promises a big showdown at a high profile location, that location is revealed as CGI that somehow looks like a below average matte painting. The biggest twist in Glass is how M. Night Shyamalan turned a blockbuster movie into a cheap, forgettable failure.
The number of corners cut in the making of Glass are rather shocking. The makeup used in many scenes is below average for even a modestly budgeted movie and the costumes are shockingly low rent. The production is stunningly mediocre and reflects the fact that Shyamalan no longer carries favor of a major studio, or studio budget. The former blockbuster director is now in the strictly low rent district, working with indie outlet Blumhouse, home of cheap, shlocky horror movies.
No one was more excited for Glass than I was. I was endlessly excited for this movie. I ignored how the trailer appeared to reveal important plot points. I ignored the cheesy lines made just for the trailer. I was completely blind to these flaws out of fealty to my love for Split and Unbreakable. Glass was going to have to fail so remarkably for me to dislike it. The failure of Glass would have to be undeniable and complete and it truly is. Glass is undeniably terrible.
