GLASS – Review

The premise of GLASS was a good idea, but considering M. Night Shyamalan’s track record, I’m not sure why anyone’s expectations were high. SPLIT was something of a critical comeback for the beleaguered filmmaker (and THE VISIT before that was a nifty little found footage shocker), but with GLASS, his sequel to two (mostly) unrelated earlier films, Shyamalan has not failed to disappoint.

GLASS opens 19 years after UNBREAKABLE with the indestructible David Dunn (Bruce Willis) running a home security shop and moonlighting as caped street vigilante The Sentry (now referred to as The Overseer), who patrols the streets of Philadelphia. He takes special interest in tracking down Kevin Crumb aka The Beast (James McAvoy), the cheerleader-abducting, multi-personalitied, cannibalistic serial killer from SPLIT (now referred to as The Horde). With the help of his tech-savvy son, Joseph (Spencer Treat-Clark), David discovers where Crumb is hiding, rescues a trio of cheerleaders and starts a massive street smackdown with the pumped-up villain. This battle is soon interrupted by Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), who captures both combatants (with the help of a small army) and transports them to her mysterious psychiatric compound, where Elijah (Samuel L. Jackson), the brittle-boned baddie from UNBREAKABLE has been residing. This is where the next long, boring 90 minutes of GLASS takes place. Once there, she tells Beast/Horde “It may not seem fair, but you are stuck in this room”, which is how I felt watching the wretched middle stretch of this film which consists of endless, talky scenes of therapy and psychobabble. There must be a half hour of close-ups of Sarah Paulson’s face, yammering on about mental disorders and comic books and holding up x-rays of frontal lobes. Paulson has more dialog than Jackson and Willis combined (reminded me of how they put Viola Davis’ buttoned up bureaucrat front and center in SUICIDE SQUAD). She’s a fine actress I suppose, but nobody is coming to see GLASS for Sarah Paulsen! The only character with more lines than her is Beast/Horde. Shyamalan directs many long single-takes in which McAvoy manically cycles through several of his personalities including 9-year-old Hedwig, fey Barry, slow-witted Dennis, and Miss Jennifer. It’s a technically impressive performance from the bulked-up actor, but this stuff worked far better in SPLIT, which was much better-written and the scenes of him crawling walls and ceilings has since lost its punch. Though the film is named after him, Glass (first name Mister!) spends the first half of the movie catatonic, sedated and twitching until it’s revealed that his 19 years of silently drooling in his wheelchair was all a ruse (just like Jim Carrey at the beginning of DUMB AND DUMBER TO!) and that he’s really been working on his master plan to escape and wipe out thousands of visitors at the upcoming opening of Osaka Tower, Philly’s largest skyscraper! This hints at a third-act action climax that never materializes. All three do escape but instead of the promised slaughter of innocents, we get a half-hour of fistfights between these characters on a parking lot. While that’s not quite as thrilling as mass murder, we do get a long twisty explanation of why they escaped through the basement instead of the side door, so there’s that. Since this is an M.  Night, there’s a twist or two, but the movie is so dull, they hardly register.

GLASS is terrible, but it falls short of the delirious, fun atrociousness of Shyamalan’s THE HAPPENING mostly because it rambles on at 135 minutes and is so poorly and hastily written. Anya Taylor Joy from SPLIT is back reprising her role as Casey, the girl whose friends were butchered by Beast/Horde. They actually bring her in to his therapy sessions and the two embrace, which makes no sense. I can’t think of a single thing to recommend about GLASSS but one of the worst things about it is all of the ridiculous existential dialog about Comic book doctrine and mythos. I suppose all of this is supposed to warm the hearts of comic book insiders, and it was part of UNBREAKABLE where it worked better when just Mister Glass was reciting it. Here it’s so awkwardly-written, especially in the exchanges between Glass and his mom, played by Charlayne Woodard, where he delivers howlers like “I’m not a special edition. I’m an origin story!”. The actress is 12 years younger than Samuel Jackson, which is fine in the flashbacks to when little Elijah is a child (she had the same role in UNBREAKABLE and a deleted scene from that earlier film is well-integrated here), but to make her look old enough to be the 60-ish Elijah’s mom, she’s wearing some of the most god-awful, unconvincing old-age makeup I’ve seen. It would have been a better idea to simply cast an older actress in the role. There are several scenes set in comic-book shops, which are a welcome distraction, but GLASS turns out to be one of Shyamalan’s worst films, which is saying a lot!

1 of 5 Stars