Hit-or-(more likely)miss writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has experienced changes in his public perception more than maybe any other filmmaker working today. After a mediocre Rosie O'Donnell comedy in 1998, Shyamalan truly made a name for himself with supernatural thriller The Sixth Sense in '99, and one year later, Unbreakable, with Bruce Willis: a grounded, meditative take on the idea of a superhero—the kind of perspective that produced films like Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy and James Mangold's Logan, but before superhero movies even went mainstream.
Although The Sixth Sense's iconic "I see dead people" twist likely cemented that film as Shyamalan's most recognized work, most cinephiles would likely tell you that Unbreakable is the superior of the two. Even then, no one—neither casual moviegoers nor diehard buffs—would have expected Unbreakable to achieve new relevance in the Hollywood canon; that is, until 2016's Split, Shyamalan's gimmicky horror-thriller about a man with 24 different personalities, turned out to have an ending scene featuring David Dunn, Bruce Willis' character from the 2000 classic.
It was at that point that everyone seemed to forget Shyamalan's record—two good films to jumpstart his career, followed by some okay films, a couple good-bad films, and several bad-bad films—and cranked the hype train to full speed for the now-inevitable third film in this apparent Unbreakable franchise, titled Glass, after Samuel L. Jackson's Unbreakable antagonist, Mr. Glass. Who cares if Shyamalan killed his own career with dud after incompetent dud? The guy made freakin' Unbreakable, and now he's releasing another one, "19 years in the making;" what could go wrong?
Well, I'll say this: at least Shyamalan didn't really have much reputation to ruin.
Glass is a hilariously pretentious and unaware mess that not only telegraphs its plot developments, but also relentlessly re-explains them aloud, as if you didn't just see what happened. It's chock full of pseudo-intellectual meta-commentary on what it presents as "the superhero story," which is really just the basic plot of most adventure dramas. Glass weakly challenges the superhero form by Shyamalan-splaining it to you on a spoon, as if you didn't already know what a superhero was or how their stories usually turn out. It pretends to be deconstructing long-unnoticed tropes while failing to realize that, yeah, we already know, dude. It's the drunk guy you met at a party in college, with whom you made the mistake of discussing a recent movie that he thinks is "game-changing."
And yet, Glass still could've managed to be enjoyable despite these "heady" themes, if it had at least spent time exploring its established characters, or competently navigated its own rules set up in the first act. But no, nothing is allowed to make sense. There is a scene in which Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson)—a psychiatrist who apparently specializes in people who think they're superheroes—is tasked with convincing Dunn, Kevin (James McAvoy's Split antagonist), and Mr. Glass that they don't have superpowers and are, in fact, delusional. It's presented as an important moment for the main characters, who are forced to confront the possibility that maybe they are letting their imaginations run a little too wild... but Dr. Staple can't even come up with moderately believable "explanations" for why the men have been able to do what they've done. I shit you not, Staple argues that the reason Kevin survived a shotgun blast to the chest, at point blank range, without a scratch, is because the shotgun used was "old" and had essentially gone stale. Same for the iron bars that Kevin bends out of shape without hurting himself. And Kevin responds as though she just shook the foundations of his world.
I'm not kidding when I say that's not the stupidest moment in the film.
Really, it's a dumb but intriguing movie for the first two-thirds. No harm done. It's the kind of movie that plays exactly like the trailer tells you it will, with nary a creative flourish, as you wait eagerly for the twist or "it's going down" moment. But it's at exactly that moment when Glass descends into rampant, reckless nonsense while maintaining a facade of dramatic control and wit. I won't get into spoilers, but the final act is simultaneously underwhelming and shockingly absurd. For a film that seems to want to talk about and analyze tropes and story structures of a genre, it's literally laughable how shamelessly it indulges them for its own plot and characters.
Glass is lazy, irrational, unconvincing, self-important, and worst of all, unsatisfying. It fails to deliver on any of its characters' arcs in a meaningful way, and teases you with the possibility of clever deconstruction, only to fall into its own traps. To make matters worse, it doesn't even make it to so-bad-it's good territory. It's just unbearably lame. But that's not to say I didn't laugh at it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95ghQs5AmNk&w=585