Is there any working director with a more interesting career than M. Night Shyamalan? He achieved huge critical and commercial success with The Sixth Sense, created a very unique take on superheroes with Unbreakable, floored many critics with Signs (although I admit I don’t see much appeal for this one. Why exactly did the aliens invade a planet covered with water if it’s their one weakness?). Then something slipped, and he began releasing dud after dud. The Village. The Lady in the Water. The Happening. The Last Airbender. After Earth. It seemed that the filmmaker once considered “the next Spielberg” had stumbled. But then his 2016 film Split received a lot of praise, many seeing it as a return to form for the director. Has he continued this success with Glass?

The final moments of Split revealed a surprising connection to Shyamalan’s Unbreakable (admittedly I had not seen Unbreakable at the time, so my reaction was more like, “Bruce Willis? What are you doing here?”) Glass serves as a sequel to Unbreakable and Split. Superhero David Dunn (Bruce Willis) continues to walk the streets and prevent crime with his abilities, eventually coming across the infamous Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), the man who suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder. Both are captured and incarcerated to a mental facility alongside Dunn’s nemesis, Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson), where they are studied by Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson). She specialises in dealing with patients who suffer from delusions and believe that they are superheroes, and she is trying to make the three see that they don’t have superpowers and that their actions can easily be explained logically. But Mr. Glass may have a sinister plan in store.

Glass is an interesting but frustrating film. There’s a lot to like here; this is not one of Shyamalan’s laughably horrible films. Glass has a lot of genuinely unique and interesting ideas going for it: the idea of a psychiatrist studying superheroes and using logic to disprove their apparent delusions is actually quite a unique idea, and it’s executed well here. There are a lot of compelling scenes of Paulson’s Dr. Staple talking to her three patients, calmly explaining away their actions in the past. How did James McAvoy pull steel bars apart with his bare hands in Split? Well, the bars were made in the 1800s, and even Dr. Paulson tells Kevin that she herself was able to bend the bars. How did he survive two shotgun blasts? The bullets were old and water-damaged. This is an interesting angle to take, and even Willis’ super-strong David Dunn begins to doubt his abilities.

Sadly the dialogue is very weak at times. It often feels like Shyamalan is talking down to his audiences, as if they couldn’t grasp these concepts without them being dumbed down to an insane degree. “This is not a limited edition,” Mr. Glass says in the third act. “It’s an origin story.” The performances are a bit of a mixed bag too. McAvoy is fantastic here, reprising his terrific performance from Split. The way he interweaves between all of his various personalities is truly stunning to watch. He can have us laughing one minute as he plays the “nine-year-old,” Hedwig, but then can turn on a dime into the unnerving mother figure, Patricia (the film’s depiction of D.I.D. and whether or not it’s accurate is a rabbit hole that I am not even remotely qualified to go down). But Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson seem tired and rather disinterested, which is a shame, as Unbreakable fans have waited nearly twenty years for the return of David Dunn and Mr. Glass.

But the biggest problem Glass suffers from is, ironically, a crisis of identity. Despite the fact that the final moments of Split revealed an Unbreakable connection, they are still two very different films in terms of tone, style, and themes. It feels like Shyamalan had ideas for both an Unbreakable sequel and a Split sequel, and then he just mashed the two together. The result is very messy, suffering from tonal inconsistency and some pacing issues, particularly in the film’s third act where the interesting ideas fall apart and it ultimately boils down to a fairly typical good vs. evil showdown that could be lifted from any other superhero film. The third act is especially disheartening after the film’s genuinely engaging second act, where it felt like Shyamalan was guiding us away from traditional superhero fare and giving us something new to experience.

M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass is an occasionally interesting but ultimately frustrating experience. It explores some genuinely interesting ideas, and it benefits from another stellar performance from James McAvoy. But the film ultimately doesn’t follow through with its unique ideas, boiling down to a boring good vs. evil showdown that could’ve been lifted from any other superhero film of the past two decades. If you’re a fan of Unbreakable and especially Split, I’d recommend it, purely to see the resolution of the three central characters. But chances are, you’ll find it comes up short. If you’re a casual audience member and just want to see a fun superhero movie . . . well, Captain Marvel comes out in March. That seems like it could be fun.







Author Details Seán Flynn Contributor Seán Flynn is in his early twenties and lives in a small town in Ireland. His ultimate passion is film, and he spends a great deal of his time getting trains to Dublin City to see obscure indie movies. He works at a cinema, and also enjoys reading. Favourite authors include J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, and George R.R. Martin. He has written reviews for ‘Grand Central Magazine’.