Watch Out For Broken Glass: Glass Movie Review
By now you’ve seen the headlines,
“Glass Is Half-Full” or “Glass Shattered” and all of the rest of the easy metaphors for Glass not living up to expectations. I’ll spare you any more of those, but to keep it one hundred, Glass is the Attack Of The Clones of the Unbreakable Trilogy.
By now you’ve seen the headlines,
“Glass Is Half-Full” or “Glass Shattered” and all of the rest of the easy metaphors for Glass not living up to expectations. I’ll spare you any more of those, but to keep it one hundred, Glass is the Attack Of The Clones of the Unbreakable Trilogy.
While Glass is not without it’s good qualities, it is bogged down by M. Night’s desire to make a deeper superhero film and the seeming desire to keep his string of twist endings going.
Glass starts off with a lot of promise,
as we catch up with David Dunn the hero of Unbreakable. David and his son Joseph have continued crime fighting in the time honored tradition of Flash and Chico, Arrow and Curtis, or Tom Holland’s Spidey and Ned. David patrols the city of Philadelphia while Joseph plays the man behind the computer role, helping him with information and the location of crimes that are currently taking place. Coupled with David’s powers they have made quite a team and are currently on the hunt for The Horde, the villain of Split.
After the initial confrontation between David and The Horde, where David fights the personality known as The Beast, they are apprehended by Dr. Ellie Staple, who takes them back to a psychiatric asylum with the intent of proving that their powers are merely figments of their imagination.
Glass plays with this idea throughout the rest of the film,
as Dr. Staple tries to prove that the powers that we have seen in the previous two films are just delusions of grandeur. On the other side of the coin we have the titular character, Mr. Glass, who is back as the mastermind who wants nothing more than to prove that he was correct in creating David in the first place.
There are several interesting ideas presented early on, such as is David limiting himself with his weakness to water? Is The Beast just another personality of Kevin, or is he an actual super powered entity? There are also discussions of motifs that reoccur in superhero stories, and fans of comic books will find a few things to think about as the characters battle over these ideas.
Ultimately though, these ideas all fall to the wayside during the ending of the film. It’s impossible to fully discuss the ending without spoilers, so consider yourself warned from here on out.
SPOILER WARNING
One of the big twists is that Dr. Staple is not trying to cure David and Kevin for any altruistic reasons, but because she is a member of a Secret Society™. This society is concerned with keeping the status quo free of any superpowered individual, so they have sent Dr. Staple to either convince the two that they are delusional, or to eliminate them by any means necessary.
This twist comes out of nowhere, and doesn’t really hold up with what we have seen in the previous two films or even earlier in the film. If Dr. Staple and her society wanted to eliminate super-powered individuals, why bring the two of them together with Mr. Glass, who created one of them and wants to create more? How powerful is this society? It seems to have members in the police force and the funds to create special cells to house their super-powered individuals. Yet, the entire society comes off like Pinky and The Brain, if Pinky made the plans.
Overall, Glass fails to capture the magic of the previous two films, as it leaves the heart of Unbreakable and the horror of Split behind for fight sequences and philosophical debates about fantasy and reality. All of which fall by the wayside for a controversial ending, which is surely going to shock the hell out of most audiences, just not in the way that the filmmakers planned.
