Trilogy ends with clear disaster
Director’s pretensions and irksome visual style overwhelm appealing trio of leads
While enduring Glass, M. Night Shyamalan’s misbegotten finale to his Unbreakable trilogy, I kept hoping that Deadpool would suddenly enter the picture and declare to the camera, “Well, that’s just lazy writing.” No such luck. Ryan Reynolds’ smartass “merc with a mouth” character has of course nothing to do with this movie or series, other than in the broader sense of the popular fantasy that superheroes walk among us. It’s a shame, though, because if ever there was a film that needed a good piss-taking, Glass is it. Writer/director Shyamalan is so intent on not making a conventional superhero movie, he ends up not making much of a movie at all. This Glass isn’t half-empty; it’s not even one-third full.
Nineteen years after Unbreakable, wherein Bruce Willis played accidental superman David Dunn and Samuel L. Jackson played his comic-book-obsessed catalyst Elijah Price ( a. k. a. Mr. Glass), Shyamalan returns to those two characters. He clumsily ropes them together with James McAvoy’s multi-personality fiend Kevin Wendell Crumb from Split, the 2016 kidnapping thriller that improved Shyamalan’s commercial fortunes after a string of duds, including After Earth and The Last Airbender. Other characters from the Unbreakable trilogy also return, among them Dunn’s now grown-up son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark) and Crumb’s resourceful
prey Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy).
Alas, we get Glass. It’s once again set in Philadelphia, 19 years after the events of Unbreakable, which began with a mass-fatality train wreck from which Dunn mysteriously emerged without a scratch. Now fully apprised of his superhuman strength and psychic abilities, Dunn performs acts of violent vigilante justice while garbed in a black hooded raincoat. He’s earned the nickname “The Overseer” from an awestruck public.
Mr. Glass is being held under supposedly close watch in a high-security psychiatric institute, which seems to be staffed by the same collection of knuckleheads who work alongside Homer Simpson in Springfield’s nuclear power plant. Glass, who dresses like he shopped at Prince’s estate sale, somehow keeps getting out of his locked room, despite being semi-conscious and of such a fragile constitution that a small knock can shatter his bones.
Crumb, meanwhile, is still on the loose after the mayhem of Split and still wrestling with his 24 diverse personalities. These include the ultra-violent one known as “The Beast,” a cannibalistic bare-chested strongman who seeks to devour victims he deems to be in need of suffering.
Events tediously conspire to foolishly bring Dunn, Mr. Glass and Crumb together at the aforementioned nuthouse, under the close scrutiny of uncharismatic egghead Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), who is convinced they are all suffering from delusions of superhero grandeur.
She might be better off directing her gaze toward Shyamalan, who is still working the risible thesis that comic books collectively constitute some kind of secret ancient history of the world, talismans for the insanity we call modern life.
Is he actually starting to believe this pretentious piffle? You have to wonder, given how much time he wastes having characters lecture each other, and us, on the unexplained mysteries of comic books and how they connect to the events of Unbreakable and Split.
All of this is delivered via serious gazes, weird camera angles and a sonorous score that are meant to signal “Caution: Auteur at Work.” Shyamalan, once deemed a filmmaking wunderkind for his breakthrough hit The Sixth Sense, has become the world’s most annoying nerd.
All the while, he’s wasting the opportunity presented by having Willis, McAvoy and Jackson together, three fine actors who could really explode superhero mythos while wreaking havoc for the amusement of popcorn chewers. The actors bring their “A” game, but Shyamalan gives them a derivative D-grade screenplay on a par with The Godfather 3 and The Matrix Revolutions, two other notorious trilogy-cappers. Which is where Deadpool could really lend a hand, by popping up to smash this leadweighted Glass. Problem is, he’d have to be on the screen every minute — which, on second thought, isn’t so bad an idea.