An unsatisfying end to a ground-breaking series
As hard as it is to believe, superhero movies weren’t always ubiquitous. In fact, there was a time when comic books were largely considered children’s entertainment. Batman, for instance, wasn’t always brooding, violent, and angry. He was once a goofy inventor of things like Bat-shark repellent.
Even in the late eighties and early nineties, superheroes in film were more camp than anything else, with stylized set pieces and larger-than-life villains. It’s hard to say exactly where the shift happened—it might have been with the release of Batman Begins or the Raimi Spider-man films. It certainly solidified into what we know now with the first Marvel Cinematic Universe film Iron Man.
But each of these films were tent pole, big budget action films by competent directors. There was another film that wasn’t this way. One that happened nearly twenty years ago, before superheroes were what they are now. One that took the idea of realism and fantasy and combined them into something fascinating.
Unbreakable, by polarizing director M. Night Shyamalan, could easily be seen as the impetus for our current world. Shyamalan had two incredibly effective opening features before his career took a turn, although arguably every film he’s made has something memorable and challenging about it.
He’s had a renaissance of sorts recently, with relatively good films like The Visit and Split. Split, in fact, had a sudden twist at the end that tied the film to Unbreakable.
These two films have led to Glass, a film that is the culmination of a three-movie cinematic universe spanning twenty years. Glass is engaging in the theater, but less so on the drive home. The more you think about Glass, the less you’ll like it.
The solution, then, is just not to think about it.
Glass is not a film you can see cold. A knowledge of the previous two film is essential. The film does its best to reintroduce the characters—David Dunn (Bruce Willis), the super strong and durable security guard from the first film, Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), the dangerous sufferer of dissociative identity disorder who can change his very physiology to match his personalities, and Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), known as Mister Glass, a hyper intelligent and hyper breakable comic book expert with a penchant for mass murder.
Glass has spent most of the last twenty years institutionalized for his criminal past, namely causing massive accidents in order to look for solitary survivors, hoping to find a superhero. Dunn, it seems, has accepted his role as protector of the innocent, hunting down criminals for violent crimes and punishing them without trial. Crumb has evaded capture since the end of the previous film and found more victims.
In typical superhero fashion, the three are brought together under unlikely circumstances. As Dunn seeks out Crumb, who has become known as The Horde, the two are captured by authorities and imprisoned in the same mental hospital as Elijah. They are there to be treated by Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), a psychiatrist who specializes in a certain delusion. All of her patients believe that they are superheroes. Treatment goes as well as you might expect.
Unbreakable, Shyamalan’s last great film, is character driven, and far more about David’s weaknesses than his strength. It’s about a person rather than a premise, which makes it effective. Split, too, had shades of this hidden between its genre-specific proclivities. Glass, unfortunately, doesn’t have any of this. It simply doesn’t have time.
The film is overwhelmingly plot driven, relying on audiences to remember the previous films in order to fill in the blanks. What explaining it does is overdone.
Glass, at times, seems like it is to comic book movies what Scream was to horror movies. It explains motivations through meta references rather than letting audiences come to their own conclusions.
This isn’t bad, necessarily, but it doesn’t make this film better than the ones that brought it to fruition. At its heart, Glass is a film for fans of the series, for the ones that wanted to know what happened to these characters and how the story ends.
The ending, like many Shyamalan films, is largely unsatisfying.
But again, if you don’t think about it too much, you might just enjoy it in spite of itself.