After Unbreakable from 2000, and Split from 2016, M. Night Shyamalan was able to bring his Eastrail 177 trilogy to an end with Glass. I liked the first two movies, and nobody knew, until Split appeared, that it was a sequel, whose first one appeared almost 2 decades ago. Nobody would have thought that a final would come so fast. On the one hand it's good, because it satisfies the audience, but on the other hand he could have waited another 10 years until he finished his trilogy. Because good things needs its time...
The Story:
David Dunn, the hero of Mr. Unbreakable, roams the streets of Philadelphia to put a stop to criminals. His talents, which he got in a train accident 19 years ago, are supernatural strength and the ability to read people at touch. Dunn has grown old and a real super villain like Elijah Price, whom he put into psychiatry 19 years ago, is missing in his life. Meanwhile the schizophrenic psychopath Kevin drives his cruelty and to feed his renegade personality "The Beast" he kidnapps young girls. Dunn of course wants to find Kevin and also meets him and both are overwhelmed by a special unit and taken to a mysterious institution where the fragile Elijah Price, who calls himself Mr. Glass, waits for both of them...
My Opinion:
Glass is not a superhero movie like you know it from other brands. It almost completely lacks the CGI. Instead, Shyamalan focuses on simple things like good and evil, light and shadow or black and white, which is easy to find in any comic world. Shyamalan relies on this polarity without exception, where he also tries to build up a deep relationship to the characters. You can see again and again how the faces of the three main characters are reflected in screens, puddles, mirrors or in the glass.
As you know it from the director, there are one or two twists in the movie, but you definitely shouldn't expect a mega twist like from Shyamalans ever first movie The Sixth Sense or from the second movie of his Eastrail 177 trilogy "Split". The movie is very simply knitted and even almost subtle during its whole running time. I think the maker wanted to take a lot of time to bring the individual main characters closer to the viewer, in which he almost exclusively dealt with them but McAvoy in his role as Kevin with the 24 personalities got the spotlight. Those who liked him in the second part "Split" won't have any problems with this role although it sometimes seems too exaggerated in the movie, where he constantly changes his personalities and you don't know anymore who he actually is. Sometimes you even think that he doesn't know it himself.
For my taste, the mysterious Mr, Glass, played by Samuel L. Jackson, got just as little attention as Bruce Willis, who plays the Overseer David Dunn. In the middle of the movie is too little story and too much idle and the try to bring the story and everything else to an ultimate end is successful. Also, the attempt to give the characters a shadow or a light in their stories doesn't really work, nor does the attempt to break the figures to make them unbreakable again isn't working how it should.
Glass isn't an action-packed superhero movie, which is also very well thought out, but an attempt to bring something successful to an end, in order not to lose the success of the prequels. Because the movie seems to be artificial and at some points it doesn't come across fluently but is too edgy. Shyamalan definitely should have taken his time to make the movie as he did with the first two, so that something would develop.
All this was the reason why Glass only got 6 stars from me at IMDb.
Images: 1, 2, 3, 4
Trailer: Universal Pictures
