If you know anything about M. Night Shyamalan you already know that all of his films (or at least all the ones I have seen) have some sort of shock ending that you aren't supposed to be able to see coming. For me, my first experience with this was in the hit horror/thriller The Sixth Sense and while there are some people out there that say that they could see the ending coming I was not one of those people. When the ring falls on the ground at the end I was completely taken aback and that made the entire movie experience so much better.
I can't really say that the rest of his movies were as shocking and in particular I thought The Village was too easy to figure out long before the big reveal at the end.
With Glass I knew there was going to be some sort of "shocking ending" simply because of the director. That's his thing. Unfortunately, it just kind of fell flat not just with me, but I think with most people.
I don't know if Unbreakable was always planning on being a trilogy, but I am pretty glad that it turned out that way even though at the time of its release, I didn't really care for the first film. I thought it was an interesting take on superheroes and villains but mostly found the various characters to be kind of lame.
In the first film we meet David (Bruce Willis) and Elijah/Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson) but we don't meet "The Beast" (James McAvoy) until the movie Split
In Glass they all finally get put together when they are all kidnapped and put inside the same mental hospital where some doctor is apparently trying to help them to realize that all their perceptions of having superpowers is just a figment of their imagination.
We find out as the film progresses that this is all actually part of a master plan by Mr. Glass to get them all together because Glass' superpower is his mind, which works in ways that normal people cannot even comprehend. I don't want to spoil the film, but basically he pretends to be in a catatonic state the entire time while he is working together a plan for them to all escape and make the world know that superheros exist.
We are re-introduced to all of their various superpowers as the film goes on, and the best interactions are between "The Beast" and David and I kept thinking about a line from The Dark Knight where Joker says "This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets and unmovable object"
These are all great parts of the film and the fact that the humans are lead to believe that they have figured out the weaknesses of all the superpower-containing humans is pretty great too. I am particularly impressed with how James McAvoy really bulked up for this role despite the fact that he is not actually a very big person. He is only 5 foot 7 (170cm) and generally weighs around 150 lbs (about 70kg). So him turning into a fearsome muscle-bound "Beast" is extremely impressive even if they did use some CGI and camera tricks in the process.
The performances by all the main characters is pretty fantastic and nobody does a bad job outside of some side characters, including M. Nigh putting himself in there for some reason, who are not good actors and likely just knew a producer or ARE the director who wants to pull a Stan Lee in be in all of his films.
The reason why this film is just kind of "meh" is because the turn, the twist, the "shock ending" is in fact shocking, but it is so convoluted that they have to spend about 20 minutes of screen time explaining it with narration. I'm all about a shock ending, I think it is what separates a lot of good films from shite films, but if you have to tell, rather than show, that much of it, there is a big problem with the script/screenplay.
it does a good job of tying the narrative strands together, but it tries too hard and fails to provide "something uniquely brainy" to the superhero genre
Most of the professional reviews tore it to shreds but there are a bunch of regular people that kind of balanced that all out. While the professional score is around 3.5/10, the audience score rates it about 7/10, for me, it is something in-between these two.
One thing that is worth noting is that if you haven't seen the previous two films, Glass is going to be even more incomprehensible to a viewer than it already is and trust me, it's pretty incomprehensible even if you HAVE seen them.
The fights in particular are fantastic because they aren't like Superman picking up a care and throwing it across town or Tony Stark flying to the middle east in a homemade suit in 10 minutes. They seem just a bit out of reach for normal humans and this follows in line with the underlying tones of superheros being just a bit more special than normal people.
The ending probably could have been done a lot better, and I am not going to spoil it for you because for a lot of people, this one is worth seeing just because it is, at its heart, a much more interesting look at potential superheros existing among us than anything Marvel or DC cranks out.
Should I watch it?
Honestly, if you are going to only watch one of the films out of the Unbreakable Trilogy I would watch the second one named Split. It is a standalone film and requires no knowledge of anything else to enjoy it. If you like that one enough, then watch Unbreakable and if you are still interested then watch Glass. Do it any other way and I think you will walk away from them. Glass is going to be really tough to understand if this is the only one of them that you watch. Even if you do watch all of them, I think you will find this one as a mid-level something or other that is trying really hard to be original and it is specifically because of that reason that it ends up failing in that endeavor.
Glass is available to stream with HBO Max or Cinemax-coupled subscriptions. It is also available to rent or buy on just about any other major streaming service
