"My Work Concerns A Particular Type Of Delusion Of Grandeur. I Specialize In Those Individuals Who Believe They Are Superheroes..."
So where do we being with Glass? Let's begin at the end of the twentieth century in which an up and coming M. Night Shyamalan blew critics and audiences away with The Sixth Sense, a psychological chiller which to this day remains one of the go-to texts for jaw-dropping, I-never-saw-that-coming twists, and a movie which solidified Shyamalan a pathway in Hollywood forevermore to make pretty much whatever he wanted. Following on from The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable continued the interesting pathway the Indian-born filmmaker had already set sail for, introducing both Bruce Willis' (Die Hard) David Dunn, the football player turned security guard with a miraculous ability to see criminal acts alongside an abnormal level of strength, and Samuel L. Jackson's (Pulp Fiction) Elijah Price/Mr. Glass, who during the climactic twist of the movie is revealed to be the overarching villain with an unhealthy obsession with comic book heroes. From Unbreakable onwards, Shyamalan tortured audiences with wave after wave of downright insulting big-screen releases, only to fully redeem himself in 2017 with Split, the James McAvoy led B-movie horror of which Shyamalan's latest, Glass, acts as a direct sequel. Confusing a huge majority of audiences who if unaware of the events of Unbreakable, questioned in tandem during the post-credit scene of Split , "why the hell is Bruce Willis in a diner?" Glass attempts to band together both Split and Unbreakable in an Avengers style team-up, offering up a confusing and sanctimonious muddle of tonal waverings whilst featuring some of the most laugh-out-loud moments of unintentional hilarity I have seen in years.
Let's face it, on a fundamental level, Glass really doesn't need to exist in any form whatsoever, with the gap between Unbreakable and Split so vast in terms of time that the decision to stitch those two films together in the first place ultimately lessens both works as a whole, with the individual picture much better as a single story rather than being the victim of utmost contrivance by slamming them altogether as trilogy. With Glass therefore, audiences heading in without previously seeing either Unbreakable or Split will have no idea whatsoever going in, a perfectly reasonable notion considering the franchise dependant world we are currently in, however with gargantuan levels of teeth grinding exposition, Glass doesn't even attempt at playing it low-key in terms of storytelling ability and instead goes straight to the George Lucas handbook by screaming every single minor detail in the loudest way possible. I mean come on, Glass is the type of film which has incidental characters literally spell out what is happening even when the audience is already a million steps ahead. Now I'm all for silly movies, I mean Skyscraper was stupid but managed to pass the time rather nicely, yet as with anything stamped with Shyamalan's name on, there seems to be a overriding sense of sanctimony creeping over it, and when the creator believes his work to be of such great importance, the weaknesses become more obvious and the grating, angry emotions begin to fester, particularly in regards to a movie which has such gaping plot holes, I literally just began to laugh at how amateurish the storytelling was out loud in a cinema full of paying customers. With no substance and a reliance on dull, uninteresting levels of wacky supposed "style", Shyamalan returns to the cinematic black hole his career once fell into, with Glass a movie which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and annoyingly degrades the watchability factor of two of his three best movies. Oh well, at least we still can watch The Sixth Sense again without puking.
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