M. Night Shyamalan burst into box-office success and critical acclaim with The Sixth Sense (1999) but since The Village (2004), when some reviewers turned on him, the director has ridden a roller coaster of wins and losses. With Glass, Shyamalan revisits two stories and three protagonists from his better regarded films, David Dunn (Bruce Willis) and Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) from Unbreakable (2000) and Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy) from Split (2016). Tying their plots together in a trilogy, Glass offers its trio of lead actors the opportunity to revisit some memorable roles.
Glass rises on the strength of its cast, who could easily fall prey to the one-dimensionality of, say, the average Marvel or DC comics production. Dunn, Price and Crumb are all supermen—or think they are. Dunn even has a costume of sorts, a long hooded raincoat, and a comic book-like name. He’s been dubbed “The Overseer” on social media.
Willis plays Dunn with the gravity of a man on a mission he’d rather leave to others, feeling a responsibility he can’t ignore. He’s a hammer-fisted vigilante punishing mindless criminal who post their ill-deeds online. If the cops don’t have time, he’ll make time. Dunn is also tracking a serial killer-sexual predator plaguing his hometown, Philadelphia. This would be Crumb. Their initial showdown interrupted by a police SWAT team, they are taken to a maximum security research hospital where Dunn’s old colleague, the brilliant Price, is confined to a wheelchair and kept under heavy sedation.
McAvoy gives a bravura performance as Crumb, a schizophrenic with 24 personalities including women, children and a Hulk-ish super villain (“The Beast”) with bulging muscles and the ability to scramble up walls—or so he thinks. Jackson—spoiler alert!—spends the first two-thirds of Glass silent, glassy-eyed, twisted and seated. But once he gets rolling…
The psychiatrist treating them, Dr. Staple (Sarah Paulson), wears a heavy mask of professional compassion as she seeks to disabuse them of their delusion. There are no superheroes or super villains, she insists, and is able to rationalize their reported feats. Dulled in stretches for lack of momentum, Glass keeps the audience guessing for the longest time. Like the wild gifts of parapsychology, super powers don’t clearly manifest under laboratory conditions. Spoiler alert: this being Shyamalan, there comes a twist. And a twist. And a final twist.
Suffice to say that Jackson tells Crumb, who has come to accept Staple’s diagnosis: “Everything extraordinary can be explained and yet it is true.” Glass is a warning about the disarming power of disbelief and a call to tap the potential of humankind as well as a glance at the pervasiveness of comic book stories in pop culture. But in the end the message—whether Shyamalan intended or not—is disturbingly double. Do we really want to empower psychopaths and sociopaths? Would we better off without superheroes and villains?
