Glass (2019)

Unsplittable
or
"I Mean, I Say 'I Made You' You Gotta Say 'You Made Me.' I Mean, How Childish Can You Get?" ("Et cetera.")

After his first brush with mainstream success, The Sixth Sense—whose word-of-mouth was so strong that it was a box-office sensation despite being released in the same Summer as Stanley Kubrick's last film and the first "Star Wars" film in 16 years—M. Night Shyamalan followed it up with an austere, no less assured contemplation on super-heroes, comic books and fanaticism. That film, Unbreakable, about a man, David Dunn (Bruce Willis), a security guard who has instincts about people he brushes up against, and soon learns (or merely stops denying) that he has strength and invulnerability after being the lone survivor of a devastating train crash.

That accident is one of many disasters engineered by one Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), a comic-book aficionado and art-dealer who suffers from osteogenesis imperfecta—brittle-bone disease—that leaves him vulnerable to breakage, and so seeks his opposite—comics teach us there must be one—a being not susceptible to any injury. He finds him in David, who walks away from the train derailment without a scratch. And Elijah (or as he's been taunted throughout his life as "Mr. Glass") pursues David to fulfill his destiny.

A great movie. A "super-hero" movie without the spandex or the primary colors. But, the studio that released it (Touchstone, a division of Disney) wanted nothing to do with any mention of "superheroes"—this was the same year as the first X-Men film and superheroes in films had a tendency to start big and fizzle as properties—and promoted it, instead, as a thriller. The film didn't do as well in theaters as The Sixth Sense, but gained a cult following on video. Shyamalan moved on.

Until he had a career resurgence recently with small-budget, restricted-scope movies, the most recent being his Split, which took the kidnap victim angle of horror movies and spliced it with a psychological angle where the abductor, Kevin Wendell Crumb (played brilliantly by James McAvoy) has 23 distinct personalities...and a 24th one of extreme rage and strength. A little story about the lasting devastation of abuse, it shared Unbreakable's fascination with humans with greater potential than the rest of us "sleepers"...and it had a coda which featured the reappearance of Willis' David Dunn. It had everything but a "To Be Continued" card. 

So, there was a lot of anticipation when it was announced that Night's next film would be a combination-sequel to both Unbreakable and Split. And that's always dangerous. Fans start making their own movies in their head and anticipate—it's an inherent social downside with sequels. That movie—Glass—will not meet anybody's expectations (with the exception of bringing back the characters and the actors who portrayed them) as, after a promising start, it then ham-strings nearly all the characters involved leading to a "showdown" that nobody will be too happy with. 

But, at least it has an ending. That's rather novel these days.

It's 19 years after the events of Unbreakable (and a limited amount of time after Split). David Dunn is no longer a security guard at a University in Philadelphia. He runs a security business—and does a little "freelance patrolling" on the side. You can't be a hooded vigilante in a town without gaining a reputation, even if nobody gets a good shot of you on social media, and David has acquired many names, such as "The Tip-Toe Man" and "The Float" (ironic as David's weakness is water—everybody's weakness in Night's movies seems to be water), but the one that sticks is "The Overseer." His son Joseph (played once again by Spencer Treat Clark) helps run the store as he also serves as David's combination Alfred and Oracle, tracking events from...well, you can't call it "The Batcave" so call it "The Storeroom," because that's what it is.

After David stops a pair of "Youtubruisers" for attacking people on the street, David turns his attention to the recent abduction of four cheerleaders, who police have been searching for (Joseph also informs him that the police are also looking for him "pretty aggressively"). Joseph gives him some coordinates to search and, sure enough, David bumps (literally) into Kevin skipping down the street in his 8-year-old "Hedwig" personality and sees the girls in his mind. A little cross-checking and he frees them.

But, Kevin shows up as "The Beast" and Dunn and battle briefly before "The Overseer" gains the upper-hand by tossing both of them out a window. At which point, bright lights come up and the two are cornered by weapons-drawing police and the person of Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), who tells them that they must surrender or they will be killed—which is questionable as David is invulnerable and "The Beast" has proven unsusceptible to bullets. They are transported to a psychiatric facility called Raven Hill Memorial Hospital, a low-maintenance security building that for 19 years has been the residence of (Dunn! Dunn! Dunn!) one Elijah Price—"Mr. Glass." How damned convenient. 

Not that the place isn't well-prepared: Elijah has been heavily sedated during the whole time into a nearly catatonic state (Jackson does some nice eye-twitching here); Kevin is put in a cell where, should he manifest "The Beast" bright lights will flash him into one of his other personalities (the other way is by saying his full name) not unlike clicking "next" on a blog-site; David is placed in a cell that is festooned with high-pressure hoses to render him helpless (Elijah I can understand, but how does Dr. Staple know that these are the latter two's weaknesses, hmm?)

It is at this point that anyone's expectations will be derailed. Instead of creating a Shyamalaniverse version of "When Titans Clash!" (the Marvel Comics trope), it's more like "When Titans Sit and Stew." Not necessarily a bad thing; one of the charms of Unbreakable was circumventing standard comic book cliches and draining the melodrama out of them, and one must acknowledge that Glass is doing the same thing while teasing us that there will be something more.

SPOILER ALERT: There won't be. 

Staples may know more than she lets on (if her knowledge of their weaknesses wasn't clue enough), but her techniques indicate that she might not; Elijah, Kevin, and David are wheeled into a room for group counseling sessions—together?—where she tries to convince the three that their abilities are only in their minds, as "delusions of grandeur" (the immediate thought burbles up: She don't know them very well, do she?). It seems a pointless and hopeless exercise—these guys have demonstrated powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men (well, except for Elijah, since he's just crazy in a six-panel-per-page kind of way). Kevin's manifestations are well-documented, and his abilities as "The Beast" have left substantial evidence of chewed bodies, bent bars and crushed torsos. David has been leaving forensic evidence (as well as fractured skulls and rough justice) for 19 years. So, why would this "expert" try to convince them that it's all in their minds?

One can only conclude that she doesn't, and that sets up one of the moribund "twists" of the movie. What she doesn't count on, however, is Elijah's scheming mind. He's been faking his vegetative state (but not too well—he gets caught a couple times) and replacing his meds with aspirin (they don't do blood tests at this hospital?) and has in his mind a plan. To Elijah, the only thing the hospital is doing keeping the abilities walking around us secret, and it his intention to bring everyone into the light of day and expose the super-humans to the world.

For that, he needs an ally, and he turns to Kevin for the muscle behind the idea. "Time for the bad guys to team up," he tells Kevin after using his light-guards to bring out "The Beast," telling him that he will have a chance against "the strong man" kept in the cell across from him, and radio's David that he will release "The Beast" to create an unprecedented disaster at a just-opening high-rise in Philadelphia...if only David can break out of his cell.

That's where I'll stop spoiling, but the spoils are in the plot rather than in my revealing of it. It seems the big deal of the story—for all concerned—is whether "the world" should know that there are "super-heroes" among us, and whether it should be suppressed or not. Yet, David has been doing his "patrols" for over 19 years. The press is all over the story about Kevin having DID, including the existence of "The Beast." So, why the big deal? Seems like the super-powered cat is out of the bag already. This tends to make the central theme of the film that Night is going on and on about absolutely meaningless. Yet, the film keeps emphasizing the point when any perspective would show that it was already a fait accompli.

There are other things—details—that don't strike one as being credible (super-heroes are?). For example, the surviving hostage from Split, Casey (the rather alien-looking Anya Taylor-Joy) is thrown into the mix. It seems she's capable of extricating the original Kevin personality from what he refers to as "The Horde," the multitude of personalities that keep him functioning and suppress him from actively killing himself. It's only been a short time since she's escaped that nightmare—and the one that she was sent back to after the film's events—and one would think that she would be a bit reluctant to revisit and show compassion for the monster that was threatening to kill her from the previous film. But, she is used as an example of "the healing power of love and compassion" to Dr. Staples, which, after the movie is over, will make you realize it's something of a red herring, psuedo-mysticism posing as psuedo-psychiatry.

Which is all very well and good, as the story has a psuedo-climax, one that will probably piss off fans of both films. Let's just say that everybody has a weakness hidden among their strengths and they are exploited in this film that has some strengths hidden in its general weakness. For me, it left the same feeling of being snookered that the two volumes of Kill Bill did, when the four hours of katana-porn ended with a bogus lecture on the nature of Clark Kent and a poke in the chest.* Glass left me feeling less than half-empty, as it is much less than the sums of the parts of two very good movies.

* Is there an intellectual form of seppuku? Because after Kill Bill, I would have used it.