M. Night Shyamalan’s would-be victory lap is a boring slog that proves the director of “Unbreakable” and “The Sixth Sense” is gone for good.
A low-budget, high-concept superhero movie that’s as clever in its design as it is joyless in its execution, M. Night Shyamalan’s “Glass” is meant to be seen as some kind of demented self-portrait, but which of its dull characters is the long-suffering auteur meant to be? Is he “Unbreakable” strongman David Dunn (a vegetative Bruce Willis), the born survivor who can withstand any amount of pain and keep on coming back for more? Is he Elijah Price (a cunning Samuel L. Jackson), the brittle mastermind who takes everything too personally, and prides himself on the devious ingenuity of his plots? Is he “Split” antagonist Kevin Wendell Crumb (an exhausting James McAvoy), who suffers from an exaggerated personality disorder that makes it difficult to guess what he’s going to do next, or to reconcile his limitless potential with his glaring inability to control it?
Or is Shyamalan the random passerby he plays in one of his signature cameos, who’s eager to tell anyone who will listen about how he turned his life around with the power of positive thinking?
The truth of the matter is that Shyamalan can be found in each of these two-dimensional cutouts, but the exact geometry of how these broken shards fit together is ultimately besides the point in a film where they’re all so easy to see through. The trouble with “Glass” isn’t that its creator sees his own reflection at every turn, or that he goes so far out of his way to contort the film into a clear parable for the many stages of his turbulent career; the trouble with “Glass” is that its mildly intriguing meta-textual narrative is so much richer and more compelling than the asinine story that Shyamalan tells on its surface.
Read More:M. Night Shyamalan Says No to ‘Glass’ Sequels, Originally Wrote the Horde From ‘Split’ Into ‘Unbreakable’ A quick recap: This was supposed to be Shyamalan’s greatest triumph — the coup de grâce of the long comeback saga that he’s been living for most of the 21st century. He burst onto the scene with “The Sixth Sense” in 1999, and by the time “Signs” came out three years later he had already been branded as “The Next Spielberg.” But audiences and critics soured on Shyamalan’s formula (a tense, vaguely supernatural mystery that’s unraveled with a big twist), and the director took that reaction to heart. His response was the dreadful “Lady in the Water,” a potential career-killer about a wayward mermaid-like woman creature who swims into the dirty pool of a Philadelphia apartment complex. Openly addressing the power of symbolism, the movie featured Shyamalan as a world-changing writer, and Bob Balaban as the misguided film critic who leads him astray (only to get eaten alive by a magical beast). It was a legendary flop. That led to the horror of killer plants in “The Happening,” and then to less personal blunders like “After Earth” and “The Last Airbender.” In 2015, then a well-established Hollywood punchline and cautionary tale, Shyamalan managed to restore a measure of control over his own fate. Going back to basics with the micro-budgeted “The Visit” (a project empowered and distributed by horror producer Jason Blum), the filmmaker scored his first win in a long time. Then, with 2017’s self-funded “Split,” Shyamalan audaciously reinvested in his own power as a storyteller, delivering a last-minute twist that revealed it to be a backdoor sequel to “Unbreakable.” It wasn’t just a nervy way of introducing an interconnected cinematic universe, it was also a naked means of testing our enduring interest in the mythos of M. Night Shyamalan. It worked. Shyamalan’s self-belief paid off in spades. And now he’s back with a movie that assembles “Unbreakable” and “Split” into two jagged pieces of a post hoc trilogy; a small January release that’s due to be received like a big summer blockbuster. “Glass” is poised to be the film that silences the doubters once and for all, and permanently re-establishes Shyamalan as a major creative force. Instead, this lugubrious slog only sharpens the feeling that he’s too raw and reactionary for his own good — that he’s grown too invested in his own story to tell any others with the patience, discipline, and power that defined his first hits. “Glass” “Glass,” which is likely to be incoherent for anyone who hasn’t seen “Unbreakable” and “Split,” begins just a few weeks after Kevin Wendell Crumb and his 23 different personalities (known as “The Horde”) have escaped into the streets of Philadelphia. The invincible David Dunn — who still struggles to accept that he’s a “superhero,” even though the private security firm he runs with his son (Spencer Treat Clark) is just a front for his vigilante work as “The Overseer” — is hot on his trail.
