Shyamalan’s ‘Glass’ looks to shatter expectations
A masterful storyteller and for two decades a Hollywood hit-maker, M. Night Shyamalan’s “Glass” (opening Friday) is an audacious, ambitious effort to build on his past successes.
“Glass” stars James McAvoy as Kevin Wendell Crumb, the astonishing center in Shyamalan’s 2016 smash hit “Split” as a man with 24 personalities.
After 19 years, Samuel L. Jackson returns as Elijah Price, the evil mastermind known as Mr. Glass, whose bones were as brittle as glass in 2000’s “Unbreakable.”
Bruce Willis first soared in Shyamalan’s 1999 breakthrough, the “I see dead people” blockbuster “The Sixth Sense.” A year later in “Unbreakable,” he was pitted against Glass as David Dunn, a security guard with super strength who was the sole survivor of the devastating train wreck Glass devised.
“Glass” brings these three characters into contemporary Philadelphia, Shyamalan’s perennial setting. Each one’s neuroses and complexities are linked to each other via earnest psychiatrist Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson, “American Horror Story”), who physically imprisons them in a high-tech asylum where she plans to perform a “procedure” on all three.
It’s one testament to the filmmaker’s abilities that every time Staple talks about the “procedure,” it seems more and more ominous — making moviegoers suddenly conflicted.
Are we supposed to root for these perhaps insane individuals to escape? Or will we cheer if Staple accomplishes her plan?
Shyamalan, a true auteur, makes a cameo appearance as a customer in Dunn’s surveillance shop.
If it’s no longer unheard of to have 35 years pass before a sequel drops (1982’s “Blade Runner,” 2017’s “Blade Runner 2049”), Shyamalan’s 19year gap between “Unbreakable” and “Glass” is startling simply because the prime teen audience for this PG-13 thriller wasn’t yet born to see what now stands as Chapter One.
That means “Glass” has to offer a lot of backstory to bring everyone up to date as it spins around our comic book obsession with superheroes and wonders: Are there really superheroes among us? Is Dunn’s superhuman ability to bend steel bars or lift enormous weight the sign of an altered, special reality that should be cherished? Or is it simply the delusion of a mentally unstable obsessive?
Mr. Glass, the man born with a bone defect that makes him brittle, is still looked after by his steelwilled mother (Charlayne Woodard). Dunn’s 30-yearold son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark) joins him in his vigilante efforts.
And even Kevin’s beautiful victim Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) from “Split” returns for a visit — and something else?