Rating: 3.5 stars
“Glass” is the highly anticipated final installment in M. Night Shyamalan’s superhero trilogy. This finale comes almost two decades after Shyamalan’s 2000’s hit, “Unbreakable” starring Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. “Glass” merges “Unbreakable” with Shyamalan’s 2016 thriller “Split” about a man with dissociative identity disorder. In “Glass” David Dunn (Bruce Willis), Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) and Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy) are united against a new evil.
The “Unbreakable” trilogy defies the average superhero movie tropes. The heroes do not have a long drawn out back story about how they came to Earth from another planet, they do not wear tights or capes and they are not trying to save the world from an alien invasion. The characters’ humanity is highlighted as the audience learns more about how their special abilities were developed.
In “Unbreakable,” comic books serve an important role in passing down essential truths through generations, a motif that Shyamalan continues in “Glass.” The heroes and villains are real people who teach us right from wrong and moral values throughout society.
Following “Unbreakable,” David Dunn, born with unbreakable bones, continued his vigilante crime-stopping spree while trying to track down Kevin Wendell Crumb, who had fully given in to “the beast” — one of his personalities that turns him into a beast-like monster. Dunn and Crumb face off very early in the movie. As a result, the two men are placed in a psychiatric hospital, where Elijah Price is also being held.
Shyamalan is famous for his twist endings, like in his notorious films “The Sixth Sense” and “The Village.” However, the twist ending in “Glass” is not as satisfying as Shyamalan fans have come to expect. The twist doesn’t give the audience the same “wow” factor that movies like “The Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable” provide.
“Split” and “Unbreakable” are very different movies and it seemed the production had a difficult time bringing these worlds together due to the fact Crumb and Price are more supervillains than superheroes. As a result, this movie seemed to be more of a sequel to “Split” than “Unbreakable” as a lot of the action focused around Crumb and his different personalities and not around Dunn and Price.
Shyamalan had a $20 million budget for this film. The action scenes in the movie are engaging and typical of any superhero movie, but the film hits a lull about halfway through when the three men are in the psychiatric hospital. This break in the action doesn’t last for long, and picks back up toward the end of the movie just to leave you wanting more.
The ending may not have been as unexpected as Shyamalan fans would have liked, but it does leave the door open for another movie about the superheroes that may come forward after Price, Dunn and Crumb. Shyamalan has the potential to launch a larger superhero universe about inspired superheroes and villains.
Overall, the movie is entertaining but seems a little sloppy. A lot of the key plot points are predictable and boring. I am hoping that Shyamalan can launch a superhero franchise that shows how superheroes become a part of society.