The ending of glass
The good, the bad and the ugly of the Eastrail 177 trilogy’s closing moments…
Forget Bruce Willis is a ghost, the finest ending of M. Night Shyamalan’s twist-tastic career remains the closing moments of Unbreakable, where Elijah Price’s emotional confession redefines everything you’ve just seen. Shyamalan repeated the trick with Split, transforming a contained horror into a supervillain origin story. With that kind of form, the final moments of Glass always needed to be something special, but the closing chapter’s downbeat finale is unlikely to satisfy fans craving the low-key heroics of Unbreakable or the spectacle of modern superhero sagas.
After a strong start and saggy asylum-set midsection – when The Overseer, aka David Dunn (Bruce Willis), and The Beast, aka Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), finally throw down – it really is exhilarating.
The constant teases, however, of a grander resolution at the opening of a major new skyscraper cast a 50-storey shadow, resulting in a case of anti-climax when you realise that
Shyamalan’s 20-year journey is about to end in a driveway.
Scale was never Shyamalan’s intention for this grounded trilogy, but a series of substandard surprises fail to pick up the slack. The revelation that Crumb’s father and Dunn were both on the Eastrail 177 train that Price derailed 19 years prior is a perfunctory twist at best. While David Dunn gets a truly unbefitting death – drowned in a puddle by a no-face SWAT guy. It still stings to think about it. Shyamalan has yet more tricks up his sleeve. Sarah Paulson’s Dr. Ellie Staple is part of an organisation that keeps remarkable individuals in check. It’s a neat idea, explaining why super folk aren’t running rampant. But the twist on top of the twist – that Elijah was concocting a contingency plan to reveal his kind to the world – suffers from a critical plausibility issue: are we supposed to believe the public will accept Price’s leaked footage as real? Is there no CGI in the Shyamlaverse? As for Shyamalan, it would seem his mojo is depleted (Split now looks like an anomaly). Maybe a fresh start is the answer, but if the noughties wünderkind ever makes a film as good as The Sixth Sense, Signs or Unbreakable again, that will be his biggest twist of all.
‘substandard surprises fail to pick up the slack’