Film Review: Glass

Sexuality/Nudity Acceptable
Violence Acceptable
Vulgarity Mature
Anti-Catholic Philosophy Acceptable

M. Night Shyamalan is a tricky director to review.  He has made some truly great movies like The Sixth Sense and Signs.  And he has made some especially horrid films like Lady in the Water and The Happening.  One of the things that makes his movies difficult to review is that many of them hinge on his trademark twist endings.  The overall experience of the film often stands or falls on how well this twist works.  But film reviewers try to avoid talking about the endings for fear of spoiling the movie.

Hence the conundrum.

And with his latest film, Glass, this same problem still holds.

Glass is the third part in an unexpected trilogy starting with Unbreakable and then with Split.  The plots and characters of those two movies now converge in here.  David Dunn (Bruce Willis) is continuing to play the subtle superhero with the help of his son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark).  His current mission is to take down the Horde aka Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), a villain with multiple personalities that includes the superhuman "Beast."  This early conflict leads to these two being taken to a mental hospital that also houses Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), the bad guy genius from Unbreakable who has brittle bone disease.  They are there because Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) believes that they are all suffering from delusions of grandeur that only makes them think that they have super powers.  The film spends most of its time investigating the intriguing possibility that all of these powers are the results of some deeper trauma or psychosis.  Meanwhile, Joseph tries to help his father get out.  Also Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), the only survivor of the Horde, is also trying to reach him.  Finally, Elijah's mother (Charlayne Woodard) is constantly trying to explain to Dr. Staple how extraordinary her evil son is.  All of this builds to a final confrontation with the players at hand.

Most of this movie is actually very entertaining.  There is something special about bringing back the original cast of movie from 19 years ago to reprise their roles.  It evokes a stronger sense of nostalgia than I had anticipated, since I was lukewarm on Unbreakable.  The action sequences are actually fairly well shot and Shyamalan does build up the tension nicely.  Watching the first clash between David and the Horde feels like a comic book crossover, which is exactly what Shyamalan intended.
However, like most of his movies, it is way too talkie.  Shyamalan always seems so self-satisfied by the cleverness of his dialogue that he lets the scenes go on longer than they should.  He has a right to recognize his own significant talent here, but he always needs to watch against his tendency to be indulgent.

But what really sells this movie is not the script or the spectacle, but the performances.  McAvoy brings all of his energy to playing the hell out of every single one of the Horde's personalities.  He loses all restraint and can devolve into pure showiness, but that doesn't diminish the skill and talent necessary to pull of this part.  I've heard others criticize Willis' performance as low energy, but I think that his stoic choices work especially as a sharp contrast to the manic energy of McAvoy.  Yet the real show stealer is Jackson.  Even though he plays catatonic for a good portion of the film, when he comes to life, his Elijah explodes with charisma.  You never forget that he is an evil man, but you cannot help but root for him a little and for his evil plan to succeed.  Jackson makes us believe every level of Elijah's genius as well as his obsession to rise to the rank of "super villain" with the name "Mr. Glass."

The supporting cast does a fairly good job as well.  The biggest standout is Taylor-Joy who actually is the beating heart of the narrative, with her odd love/hate relationship to the Horde.  Clark does a fine job as does Woodard.  Paulson's overly sincere performance was a bit grating.  Her over-emoting may have been an affectation of being a therapist, but he dripped with condescension to the point where it made her unpleasant to watch.  Her softness made her assertiveness a bit maddening, like being suffocated by a giant marshmallow.

The reason why we feel for Elijah and attach to his journey is that he wants something that all of us want:  we want to matter.  We want to believe that there is something special about us.  Dr. Staple wants us to believe that we are all ordinary, like Syndrome for the PIXAR classic The Incredibles.  We want to believe that extraordinary things are possible and that we are capable of them.  Shyamalan wisely never lets you forget that Elijah is an evil man.  This movie is not about Elijah's redemption, but about his revenge.  He hurts many innocent people to serve his own egotistical need to matter.  But in the power struggle with Dr. Staple, her duller world is much less attractive than Elijah's world of wonders.

There is nothing wrong with the very Catholic idea of finding beauty and holiness in the ordinary.  But the point of this is to elevate the every-day to greater heights.  Dr. Staple wants to flatten the world and make everything not so much ordinary but empty.  But we believe that God made us all extraordinary, "a little less than a god." (Psalm 8:6).  This means we are capable of extraordinary good like David or extraordinary evil like the Horde and Mr. Glass.  The solution of those like Dr. Staple is to remove all of the extrodinariness from the world.  God's plan seems instead to let his extraordinary creatures choose for themselves.  While Elijah and the Horde may make evil choices, they at least choose to be be extraordinary.

So why doesn't this movie score higher with me.  It's because of that trademark twist ending.  As I wrote earlier, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

This time it doesn't.

SPOILER ALERT AHEAD

I will try to write this next part as vaguely as possible, but it may give away the ending.  The problem with the movie is that it finishes out one of the character's arcs in such a horribly unsatisfying way.  It isn't even that the arc defies expectations ala The Last Jedi, but it feels like a spit in the face for anyone who cared for the character.  Imagine if in the next Avengers movie, Tony Stark's story arc ended by him, in the middle of a fight with Thanos, slipping on a banana peel and becoming paralyzed from the neck down.  It would be such an ignoble conclusion to a character's years-long journey that you could not help but feel cheated.  That is how the ending to Glass made me feel.  I left the theater with a very clear emotion:  pissed.

END SPOILER

There is a lot of talent and skill mixed up in making the ambitious Glass.  This could have been a fantastic finally if only Shyamalan had stuck the landing

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