GLASS (2019)

Studio:      Universal Pictures
Director:    M. Night Shyamalan
Writer:      M. Night Shyamalan
Producer:  Marc Bienstock, Ashwin Rajan, M. Night Shyamalan, Jason Blum
Stars:     James McAvoy, Bruce Willis, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sarah Paulson, Samuel L. Jackson, Spencer Treat Clark, Charlayne Woodard, Luke Kirby, Adam David Thompson

Review Score:

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Summary:

While a psychiatrist attempts to convince them they are delusional, three men with extraordinary abilities prepare for a faceoff with each other.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Aided by his son Joseph, who works a computer while remotely communicating with his father through an earpiece, invulnerable vigilante David Dunn tracks down and beats two YouTubers who viciously attacked a man in the street. Debriefing with Joseph at the home security store where they work, David learns that people who follow his activities have dubbed him ‘The Overseer.’ David and Joseph continue looking for clues regarding the disappearance of four cheerleaders.

Kevin Wendell Crumb, whose dissociative identity disorder gives him personalities that include mannered woman Patricia, nine-year-old Hedwig, Dennis, Barry, Heinrich, Jade, Ian, Mary Reynolds, Norma, Jalin, Kat, B.T., Mr. Pritchard, Felida, Luke, Goddard, Samuel, and Polly, holds the cheerleaders captive in an abandoned brick factory. Hedwig warns the girls that The Beast, who is Kevin’s superhuman 24th personality, is coming soon.

David intentionally bumps into Hedwig while walking the streets of Philadelphia looking for signs of the cheerleaders. The incidental contact triggers David’s intuition ability, which shows David a mental flash of the brick factory. With Joseph’s help, David tracks the factory’s location.

David frees the captive cheerleaders. Kevin returns to the factory having taken the form of The Beast. The four girls flee while David and The Beast fight.

When their fight spills outside, David and Kevin are captured by police. Dr. Ellie Staple, a psychiatrist who specializes in delusional patients who believe they are superheroes, has the two men committed alongside catatonic Elijah Price, a gifted genius who suffers from brittle bone disease, at Raven Hill Memorial Psychiatric Hospital. David is held in a room designed to douse him with water, which is his weakness, if he endangers the staff. Kevin is held in a room rigged with strobe lights that forcibly change his personality until he becomes docile.

Joseph tries to get his father out of the facility. Ellie gets Joseph to doubt David’s abilities by suggesting the death of Joseph’s mother triggered delusions in both of them.

After learning her former captor was captured, Casey Cooke comes to Raven Hill to see Kevin. Casey’s touch causes Kevin to become his real self. Casey relates to Kevin as a person who was abused by her birth family just like he was. Recognizing Casey’s ability to break through to Kevin, Ellie asks Casey to help her treat his delusion, but she declines.

Nurses Pierce and Daryl find Elijah out of his room.

Ellie conducts a group session with David, Kevin, and Elijah. By forcing them to reflect on childhood traumas, Ellie influences both David and Kevin to consider that they do not possess superhuman abilities at all.

Casey becomes inspired to research superheroes at a comic book shop. Joseph researches villains at the same store, which inspires him to investigate Kevin’s origin beginning with his father Clarence Wendell Crumb, whose sudden abandonment created Kevin’s 24 identities while his mother Penelope became abusive.

Pierce finds Elijah out of his room again. Daryl relieves Pierce to take the nurse’s night shift. While Daryl is distracted by a conversation with a security guard, Elijah uses an office computer to research David. Elijah also reads Kevin’s intake file. Elijah sees a Philadelphia Magazine cover about the city’s new Osaka Tower building.

Elijah unlocks Kevin’s cell. Identifying himself as ‘Mister Glass,’ Elijah tells Patricia he can break them out of the facility if Patricia can prove The Beast is real. She agrees.

Elijah later slashes Daryl’s throat and escapes his room. Elijah disables the strobe lights to free Hedwig. Hedwig becomes The Beast. Elijah tells The Beast that he must fight David atop Osaka Tower in order to convince the world that people with superpowers exist.

Elijah tells David he plans to blow up Osaka Tower. Elijah adds that the only way for David to prevent countless deaths is to stop doubting his invulnerability by breaking out of his room.

Pierce returns for his morning shift. The Beast crushes him to death with a bear hug. The Beast and Elijah escape the building through the basement. The Beast takes down multiple security guards while Elijah briefly pauses to hack the computer system.

Casey, Joseph, and Elijah’s mother Mrs. Price all come to the hospital to see Ellie. Ellie discovers Daryl’s body and finds a taunting note from Elijah about his Osaka Tower plot. The three family members overhear Ellie report the threat to police.

David breaks down the door of his cell. After retrieving his rain poncho and wedding ring memento, David goes outside to confront Elijah and The Beast.

Ellie, Casey, Joseph, and Mrs. Price watch David battle The Beast. Elijah tells The Beast that David is weak against water.

Joseph tells The Beast that Elijah hid the truth about Kevin’s parents. Joseph reveals that Clarence Crumb didn’t abandon Kevin and his mother. Rather, he was killed on the train Elijah blew up to reveal David’s super strength.

Elijah admits that he masterminded the creation of both David and Kevin. The Beast thanks Elijah for what he did, but notes that he cannot be trusted to keep Kevin safe. The Beast fatally wounds Elijah by breaking several of his bones. The Beast then throws David into a water tank and continues their fight. However, The Beast flees when more cops arrive.

Casey stops The Beast and forces him to revert into Kevin. Casey tearfully appeals to Kevin to remain “in the light” with her. A sniper uses the opportunity to shoot Kevin, who subsequently dies in Casey’s arms.

After Joseph is dragged away, a guard with a clover tattooed on his wrist begins drowning David in a pothole puddle. Ellie extends her hand for David to take. The same clover tattoo is seen on Ellie’s wrist. When David touches her, his intuition ability shows him a flashback revealing Ellie is part of a conspiratorial cabal dedicated to keeping superhumans secret. The guard successfully drowns David.

Ellie tells Elijah about the cabal by explaining her group is committed to keeping would-be gods from overpowering humanity. Elijah then dies after telling his mother that what she witnessed was actually an origin story.

Ellie’s team erases all of the security footage of David and Kevin using their abilities. She then relays a cover story to hospital staff. Ellie reports back to the cabal and asks for approval to move to the next city.

Before leaving Philadelphia, Ellie stops in the comic book store. Ellie realizes she overlooked something when she overhears two comic book geeks discussing how criminal masterminds always keep their true plans hidden.

Ellie returns to the hospital where she discovers Elijah streamed all of the security camera feeds to a private server. Ellie realizes Elijah never planned to destroy Osaka Tower. Instead, Elijah plotted a suicide mission that intentionally used the cameras Ellie installed to deter him from escaping.

Mrs. Price, Joseph, and Casey find the footage on their computers. The three of them upload the footage online. Mrs. Price, Joseph, and Casey then meet in a train station to watch stunned reactions as video proof of superpowers begins spreading worldwide.

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Review:

I’ve heard multiple claims that “Glass” plays terrifically as a creatively nuanced piece of long-form storytelling when viewed in succession with its predecessors “Unbreakable” and “Split.” That may be true. However, the prospect of revisiting three hours and 45 minutes of dialogue-dominant material just to potentially gain modestly more insight into one movie is not only impractical, it’s unfair.

Any film, even a sequel, ought to be reasonably coherent and enjoyable as a standalone experience without requiring additional action from its audience. I’m comfortable having only a cursory recollection of “Unbreakable” from my single screening in 2000 and a slightly better memory of “Split” from 2016 (review here). Consider this a declaration of context that I’m coming at “Glass” as someone with an at best casual interest in the trilogy’s world-building. From that perspective, the best conclusion I can draw is that “Glass” is disappointingly dull.

“Glass” brings together “Unbreakable’s” invulnerable vigilante David ‘The Overseer’ Dunn (Bruce Willis) and diabolical mastermind Elijah ‘Mr. Glass’ Price (Samuel L. Jackson) with “Split’s” Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), the unstable madman with 24 (mostly) distinct personalities, one of whom is the impossibly powerful ‘The Beast.’ Two of these three men meet when David’s street-level heroics put him on a collision course with Kevin, who has kept up with his kidnapping capers by imprisoning four cheerleaders in an abandoned brick factory. Unfortunately for both men, their battle spills outside where they are captured by authorities under the direction of Dr. Ellie Staple, a psychiatrist confident she can cure David and Kevin of their comic book delusions.

At this point, “Glass” promptly puts everything on pause. Action. Momentum. Character development. Everything. Substituting first act exposition where second act intrigue should be mounting, “Glass” enters narrative hibernation for the next hour as Dr. Staple attempts to convince David, Kevin, Elijah, and their closest personal connections that superpowers only exist in their heads.

It’s a pointless plot complication because the audience knows who these men really are. We’re essentially tasked to sit still for 60 minutes while the movie momentarily transmutes David, Kevin, and Elijah to question their true identities. Once it becomes time to turn into the third act, “Glass” returns everyone to the condition they were in before their mental institution incarceration, making the trio’s trip into temporary self-doubt ultimately inconsequential.

A reason later arises for why the following happens. But writer/director M. Night Shyamalan does his movie no favors in the unrewarded anticipation department by repeatedly teasing a climactic confrontation atop an exploding skyscraper. The bait taken, “Glass” then swaps the finale’s setting for a plain parking lot where Willis and McAvoy blandly bear hug each other against van doors like WWE wrestlers catching their breath during a long match. This match-up hardly meets the hype from three films worth of buildup.

Issues with “Glass” aren’t entirely related to unfulfilled expectations for a superhero thriller whose genre can only spare a cobwebbed corner for it. By having Anya Taylor-Joy reprise her “Split” role as Casey, the only victim to survive Kevin Wendell Crumb’s clutches, “Glass” weirdly romanticizes Stockholm Syndrome to where Casey has an oddly affectionate relationship with her former kidnapper and confirmed killer. “Glass” wants so much for its emotional arcs to be meaningful, yet the pieces it has to work with stubbornly refuse to fit comfortably in the frame.

Being a fan of comic creators like Alan Moore and Frank Miller, I genuinely appreciate M. Night Shyamalan’s drive to ground graphic novel concepts inside a closer approximation of everyday reality. But the 21st-century superhero cinema landscape in 2019 isn’t what it was in 2000, when general audiences were conditionally receptive to “Unbreakable” removing capes and spandex to present super-humans as ordinary people. “Glass” follows up nearly two decades too late. Now its conversational pacing and gloomily grey scenery seems trite and uninteresting when compared with where filmic four-color entertainment has progressed in that span.

It’s fair to mention that I’m writing this “Glass” review during the month of the movie’s home video release, April 2019, which is the same month “Avengers: Endgame” is rewriting box office history. Due to their vastly disparate budgets, tones, objectives, and conceptions, it’s not a 1:1 comparison between the two films. It’s not exactly apples and oranges either. In broad terms, they’re both superhero-centric stories. The reality is, it’s impossible to be excited about a doctor interviewing three seated super-humans while Captain Marvel, Black Panther, and the Guardians of the Galaxy are colorfully fighting an intergalactic threat for the fate of mankind. And while the MCU orchestrates a spectacular 12-issue maxiseries crossover epic, “Glass” delivers a humdrum 22-page one-shot fated to be sold five-for-$1 alongside old Archie comics in a water-damaged long box.

Review Score: 50

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