Glass
Samuel L. Jackson makes for a mesmerising supervillain, and there's a pleasing physicality to Glass's superhero showdowns, but Shyamalan just can't help himself when it comes to convoluted dialogue and eye-rolling twists
Props to M. Night Shyamalan. Just a few years back the once-celebrated director of The Sixth Sense and Signs had become a punchline, his name a shorthand for filmmakers of high ambition but dubious quality. Following a pair of surprise low-budget hits, The Visit and Split, Shyamalan seemed to have found his groove in the realm of the horror cheapy, although it turned out the latter movie wasn’t the simple creepshow it appeared.
For most of Split’s runtime, audiences thought they were watching a standalone serial killer slasher about a disturbed young man (Kevin Wendell Crumb, played by James McAvoy) suffering from dissociative identity disorder, with one of his two dozen discreet personalities unfortunately being a flesh-eating monster called The Beast, who can scale walls, bend steel and take a shotgun bullet to the chest without wincing. A classic Shyamalan twist revealed Split to be a sequel to his lowkey superhero yarn Unbreakable from 2000, which featured Bruce Willis as David Dunn, an average family man who discovers he’s really a dad-bod Superman after walking away unscathed from a train crash orchestrated by dastardly genius and comic book aficionado Elijah Price aka Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson).
In this convoluted final chapter, Shyamalan throws all three characters together in a hilariously understaffed asylum for the criminally insane, and lets sparks fly. The three men are under the observation of psychologist Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), who specialises in treating people with delusions of grandeur. Could it be that David Dunn isn’t just crazy strong, but crazy? Maybe Crumb’s alter ego The Beast is no more bullet-resistant than his 23 other personalities, such as Hedwig, a lisping nine-year-old who’s keen on rollerskating and Drake. Mr Glass has other ideas, though, and Shyamalan’s film is at its most alive when Jackson’s supervillain is scheming an escape, lyrically monologuing about comic book lore or goading his two meathead cellmates into battle.
It’s disappointing, then, that Shyamalan leaves his title character in a drug-induced stupor for the early part of the movie. The bulk of the screentime goes to crowbarring McAvoy’s multi-personality killer into the superhero universe, which proves a bit tiring, but there's crass fun to be had in watching the Scottish actor run through his party trick of accents and personas. While McAvoy chews the scenery, Willis plays it stoic, silent and unspecific, disappearing into the background; if it wasn’t for the dirty green rain poncho and the super-strength, we could as well be watching his vigilante doctor from the recent Death Wish remake.
Shyamalan, who was once compared to Spielberg, still knows how to frame a striking shot and put together a thrilling sequence. Like in the Marvel films, there’s an obligatory fight in a car park, but there’s a pleasing lumbering physicality to the clash between Dunn and The Beast that’s more satisfying than the CGI baletics of, say, Thor slugging the Hulk or Captain America putting the hurt on Iron Man. The idiosyncratic director can’t help but trip himself up, though, with his love for lugubrious pacing and goofy mythologising. Oh, and there’s the patented Shyamalan twists: we counted at least three of them, each more eye-rolling than the last. When Glass is a Samuel L. Jackson prison-break movie, it’s a lot of fun. If Shyamalan could just rein in his own delusions of grandeur, he might make a decent director of B-movie trash one day.
Released 18 Jan by Universal; Certificate 15