Glass (M. Night Shyamalan)

[Dead & Messed Up]

[Dead & Messed Up]

I need time to process this one. The first 90-100 minutes, I was really enjoying myself, with some caveats (this asylum has some incredibly lax security), but the final fifth of the movie zags so many times that I honestly feel like I have no idea what just happened. A part of me hates some of those final choices but thinks other ones are awfully neat and couldn't've happened without those other choices (that's what some would call contrived writing).

I will say this: (1) if you didn't watch the previous two films, the film doesn't really accommodate you. It offers some exposition, but it felt like some of the nuances will be lost to filthy casuals. (2) This movie is not an action film. It is a supernatural suspense melodrama predominantly set in a hospital. The action-packed trailers are misleading.

At the moment, I think the film is mostly Split-quality, but boy that ending... maybe it's that I think I like what Nighty's chewing (I think), but he just bit off way too much of it. But even so, that's, like... I just need some time with this one.

[I'm an enormous fan of Unbreakable, which further muddies the waters.]

[I'm giving it 4/5 but it's more of a generous 3/5 because that rating just seems average to me, and whatever this film is, it is not an "average" film.]

[Skitch]

May the term "filthy casuals" live forever.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Something I forgot to note: the absence of James Newton Howard is deeply felt. This composer alternates between borrowing Howard's cues, sub-Zimmer ticking-clock rhythms, and what sounds at times like spa music. Another victim to the Great God of Incidental Music.

[Ezee E]

Is there a movie with more twists out there? Maybe not.

But I did like it nonetheless, especially until the climax begins/ends its first moment. The setup and how they'll all escape from the asylum is as good as anything Shyamalan's ever done. Afterwards, it kind of explodes onto itself, and in all bad ways really. It wasn't enough to stop me from enjoying it, but it does get pretty comical after a while.

Shyamalan has always known how to compose shots, and he continues that. But the man needs a writer.

[

Show Spoiler

If there's a third movie, the team is pretty terrible...

]

Also, Spencer Treat Clark is a terrible actor. They didn't HAVE to cast the son from Unbreakable, you know.

McAvoy is the best out of the three. And the movie stays good when it's focusing just on them.

[Peng]

Never have I understood the appeal of (vulgar) auteurism more than during this film, where Shyamalan's heady ideas and evocative imagemaking collide full on with his writing. The main problem, I think, is we already spend two previous films with these three main characters, and Glass's superhero myth thesis doesn't fit all of them well on a basic motivation level. Sarah Paulson gives it a good try, but given that we and Bruce Willis already go through Unbreakable together, her persuading him about his superhero legitimacy comes off like a lot of contrived straining on her part and a lot of unconvincing logic leap on his, making more than half of his scenes feel like tedious dramatic dead weight. McAvoy fares a bit better despite also having been established in a previous film, because his character's psyche and power at least makes sense within Paulson's proposal.

The strongest though, in performance and character's sense, is Samuel L. Jackson, whose Glass now gets to be both a delicious scenery-chewer (finally not having his character's nature being kept as twist) and a compelling tragic figure. The stratospheric superhero boom almost two decades after Unbreakable, coupled with Jackson's own well-known role as Nick Fury, provide both twisted subtextual power and considerable emotional weight to Glass's attempt to be the mastermind of creating his own superhero cinematic universe. Thus his constant meta-commentary on superhero tropes comes off well because of that (I love Sam Adams' observation that it's as if Glass is the "That's Chappie"-whispering guy insides an actual Chappie film), and also because Shyamalan tries to be as subversively perverse as possible in utilizing those tropes, fervently embracing and harshly pushing them away at the same time. This is a Frankenstein of a film, clumsily gluing parts of other films and potent ideas together with fully visible, barely held-on duct tapes, but despite that, it still has something deeply resonant shining through all the same. 6.5/10

[Pop Trash]

"FIRST NAME MISTER LAST NAME GLASS"

I kinda love this? Shyamalan is wildly underrated as a director (separated from his writing) that I think he's as good as any American director working right now (Wes Anderson might top him and maybe a few Tarantino / Scorsese / PTA films... but certainly not all of their films). Anytime I read criticism of his films, it's almost entirely due to his writing (both storytelling and dialogue). He's compared to Spielberg all the time, but he reminds me so much of a PG-13 family friendly Brian De Palma. Both of them are careful formalists making one memorable image after another (just off the top of my head in this one: the shot of Mr. Glass's shock of hair haloed in the back by an orderly shining a flashlight in his face, [

Show Spoiler

David Dunn's drowning death shot below water

], the p/o/v shot -and there are many great p/o/v shots here- between the racks at the comic book shop) and both of them pitch their films in an almost operatic melodrama way that creates an intoxicating alchemy between the ridiculous and the sublime.

Look, if you are wanting anything approaching realism -and why the fuck would you want M NIGHT SHYAMALAN to be realistic?- you aren't going to like this at all. If you are looking for a low fantasy, low key version of the X-Men or the Avengers, say no more shyamalan famalam. The idea of superheroes teaming up in a hothouse snakepit because obviously everyone thinks they're bonkers is so good, that I'm surprised DC or Marvel didn't beat him to the punch (and maybe they have? I'm not enough of a comic book nerd anymore to know). Also, all of the I'm a motherfucking auteur deal with it trademarks are here: the cameo, the shots of reflections, the twist ending before the real twist ending that makes you sit there questioning if it had to end that way, the long takes, the goofy jokes, the location shoot repping of Philly. Glass won't convert any agnostics or apostates and it might not be the best Shamy movie, but it's certainly the MOST Shamy movie and I totally dig it.

[Irish]

This might very well be the worst film of 2019

[Grouchy]

I wish this movie was good because the ideas behind it are pretty great. But no, it's Shyamaldingdong at his finest... Great directing (I was also reminded of De Palma) and a lackluster resolution with plot twists that render the whole thing kind of pointless, plus questionable character choices and implausible moments galore.

The bottom line is, I wouldn't watch a sequel with Sarah Paulson locating other exceptional beings.

[Skitch]

I enjoyed it. As far as his filmography goes, its pretty good.

[Pop Trash]

I wish this movie was good because the ideas behind it are pretty great. But no, it's Shyamaldingdong at his finest... Great directing (I was also reminded of De Palma) and a lackluster resolution with plot twists that render the whole thing kind of pointless, plus questionable character choices and implausible moments galore.

The bottom line is, I wouldn't watch a sequel with Sarah Paulson locating other exceptional beings.

How do the plot twists render the whole thing kind of pointless?

[Grouchy]

How do the plot twists render the whole thing kind of pointless?

Well, if it was always the organization's plan behind everything it renders everything Elijah and David did inconsequential. Unbreakable used to be about a mastermind who found a hero and purposefully occupied the role of the villain. Now said mastermind is a pawn on a global game played by some CIA-type group, and he can't even cheat his way out of death. His only hope is to become Wikileaks.

I guess in the end it only ruins Unbreakable, not this film itself.

[Skitch]

I'm still not sure how that ruins Unbreakable. That movie was told from the perspective of people at the ground level who had no idea of the big organization.

[Grouchy]

Ok, I'm wrong.

[Dukefrukem]

Very mixed feelings about this. Surprised that Spencer Treat Clark actually returns to play David Dunn's son nearly 20 years later; James McAvoy is still the standout here.

I'm not sure I totally buy in with the multiple twists and turns in the last act. I was obviously expecting something; but nothing like the ending we were given; which did feel quite anticlimactic. I enjoyed most of the hospital stuff, questioning the existence of super heroes and super villains.

[dreamdead]

So incredibly inert and jumbled with who we should care about. This film foregrounds Paulson's character and yet denies us her interiority, when the end of the film actually privileges all of the three lead's families/interlocutors. And while that's the "twist," it makes everything so dramatically inert and repetitive--with endless speechifying about comics and limited editions--that stop dead any thrust.

Instead of the entirely dumb "maybe you don't have superpowers" middle act--which has no dramatic tension because, y'know, we've already seen two of these films--it would have benefited from focusing on Anya Taylor-Joy's and Spencer Treat Clark's characters interacting, which would have led to an actual payoff. Unfocused scriptwriting throughout that damns this project--a shame, since the rewatch of Unbreakable reminded me that Shyamalan could be an interesting and understated writer/director.

[megladon8]

Campaign to rename the three leads’ superhero / villain names...

David Dunn -> Captain Magic Fingers

The Beast -> Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place

Mr. Glass -> Broke Motherfucker

[DavidSeven]

This was more entertaining than the lackluster reviews suggested, but I still wish it didn't exist. It diminishes the power of the two really good movies that came before it.

20 years after Unbreakable, David Dunn is still chasing down petty criminals (YouTube thugs, really?) in a poncho. Elijah, who we're told is too brilliant to contain and is a confirmed mass murderer, has sat idly in a mental institution with embarrassingly lax security standards for two decades. The first film's ending suggested that David and Elijah would be intertwined forever. That their stories would be like those hero/arch-nemesis stories we see in comic books, like Superman/Lex Luthor or Batman/Joker. Instead, we come to find out that "finding their place in the world" didn't amount to much until the events of Glass. That's disappointing.

Unbreakable and Split were both great at building foundations in human stories. Unbreakable was maybe the most perfect story about the malaise that comes from not knowing where you fit in the world and how that can cripple the relationships around you. Split was, at its core, a simple story about surviving and overcoming abuse. Glass is really too wrapped up in its view of comic book mythology to really land emotionally. It was made well enough from a technical standpoint -- though as DaMu point out, losing James Newton Howard was huge --- but this really did feel like a rush writing job that has none of the deft emotional elements of the prior films. Most likely, the studio and Shyamalan were capitalizing on the unexpected critical success of Split, neither believing they would really be in this position. It probably would've worked out better for everyone if Shyamalan had been forced to wait another few years, and really work out the script.

[Rico]

The script was problematic for sure. But I loved those last 30 minutes or so. I finished the movie and immediately went back to rewatch the final showdown.

Particularly I liked Glass' speech to David getting him to knock down the door.