Glass is M. Night Shyamalan’s Sisyphus. With Split, I think everyone was ready to welcome Shyamalan back into the fold, creating tense thrillers with great hooks like “James McAvoy plays 10+ characters.” Glass tries to transfer Split’s goodwill into the Unbreakable story Shyamalan created 19 years ago. Glass loses some of the goodwill – it’s not nearly as good as Split – but it is at least fun, using McAvoy and Samuel L. Jackson to flex their talents a bit.
Unbreakable opens reintroducing us to the main characters. David Dunn (Bruce Willis), introduced as the man who survived a train crash because he has unusual brute strength in 2000, is now running a security consultant company with his son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark). Dunn double as a superhero vigilante at night, saving nice people from jerks like YouTubers punching people for fun. Conversely, Kevin Crumb, aka the Horde (James McAvoy), has continued his creepy ways, capturing 4 cheerleaders where he would probably feed them to one of his 23 split personalities, The Beast. Those two are clearly fated to collide, but when they do, they are intercepted by Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), who places them into a psych ward for evaluation. As it happens, Staple also has super smart Elijah Price aka Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson) in this ward, who has a history with David Dunn.
Glass suffers a bit from poor timing. Unbreakable came out in 2000, where Elijah Price waxes poetically about the intersection of comic books and life. At that point, I think, just the Batman movies had existed in the superhero genre. So after about 1,000,000 superhero movies later, Glass comes out. The central discussion/mythology in the movie is trying to convince these super humans that they are not super, but just VERY lucky with coincidence. Shyamalan is assuming audiences can forget the last two decades of comic book movies they’ve seen come to life, trying to time warp us back to 2000. This conversation goes on for like an hour, keeping Glass’s super humans from working together and leaving open consistent underestimation of Elijah which makes all these psychiatrists look hella dumb. It also makes us forget why we were excited to watch this movie: Split, which was a tense thriller, not a philosophical treatise on what it means to be super.
That doesn’t mean Glass isn’t fun though, because it totally is, because of Samuel L. Jackson and James McAvoy. McAvoy carries the first half of this film, credited with playing 20(!) different characters. Most of the excitement is watching him switch from character to character, using his whole arsenal of skills. The transformation into The Beast is still terrifying thanks to McAvoy selling the sh*t out of it. Even crazier, he gives us credible arcs from some of the characters he’s playing, which is crazy! When we start to maybe grow tired of McAvoy by the midway point of Glass, Sam Jackson then starts to flex his acting muscles. He starts with some great face twitching (he’s sedated to keep his intellect at bay), which then grows and grows as the sedation wears off. They pair him a lot with McAvoy, which is simply high end entertainment. The final act clearly leads to a showdown between McAvoy’s Beast and Willis, which is highly entertaining, and shot from really cool angles, while Sam Jackson is waxing poetically about which comic book this fight is representing. Anytime you can work in a Sam Jackson monologue into your movie, it’s really hard for me to dislike it.
Despite being over 2 hours, Glass is never special, but it is rarely boring. I don’t know how I feel about the Shyamalan universe, though. It’s not a dumpster fire like DC Comics, but it’s leagues behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I wonder what Mr. Glass has to say on the topic….