In 1999 The Sixth Sense made writer/director M. Night Shyamalan an overnight sensation with its supernatural plots. Unbreakable followed shortly after, and then there was Signs with Mel Gibson and farm aliens. But with The Village, The Lady in the Water and The Happening, Shyamlan’s brand was all but ruined.
In 2016 Split was released starring the brilliantly talented, James McAvoy as Kevin Wendell Crumb, a nut job with twenty-three very distinct personalities. He held three young teens hostage. They needed to escape before the emergence of personality number twenty-four.
Enter Glass in 2019, a comeback production for Shyamalan (or so we hope) in a story that connects the worlds of Unbreakable’s Samuel L. Jackson and Split’s James McAvoy, as Security Guard/vigilante David Dunn (Bruce Willis) survives a train crash, who uses his own secret power abilities to track Crumb (McAvoy.) Apparently Crumb’s fore-mentioned 24th power is now apparent. Casey (Anna Taylor-Joy) returns as the kidnapped teen who has since become his um, friend.
The film opens creepy-brilliant with Crumb’s (McAvoy’s) tied up cheerleaders. His logic is that they’re ‘pure’ and haven’t done any suffering in life. Willis’s son, Joseph Dunn (Spencer Treat Clark, from the original Unbreakable) tells his dad via webcam, where he believes the kidnapper to be hiding out. Of course, with Willis’s vigilante supernatural powers, he can figure it out by intuition. They’re hiding in a warehouse.
Before long Crumb and Dunn find themselves at Raven Hill Memorial, an institution run by Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson.) She specializes in individuals who believes they’re super heroes. She believes that Dunn suffered frontal lobe damage in his brain from his train accident. Dr. Staple puts them through a series of tests that engage them to look for the moment of weakness of their past that forced each of them to be super strong. And so Crumb, Dunn and Glass (Samuel Jackson) are finally reunited just as Shyamalan always wanted.
There’s a lot of psycho-babble in Split where the three live in sterile, contemporary and minimalist rooms. 1950s background music and a handful of family photos are all that surround them.
Yet, for what the film is, it’s good. But nobody would call it great.
McAvoy delivers a diabolical performance but the problem is that his incredible acting is useless to the bigger picture of offering something outside of a role in insanity. Instead, it’s Willis’s cool, calm demeanor with a calculated performance that gets our attention.
We aren’t sure what’s really going on or what will happen (as intended) but Dr. Ellie Staple believes – and convinces us – that the cast-of-crazies are all delusional.
The most surprising bit of this thriller isn’t the film or the acting, but that M. Night Shyamalan is back with twist and turns that bring the ending to a tearful climax. (spoiler alert.)
Shyamalan says this was twenty-years-in-the-making since his days of “I see dead people.”
(Btw,”I see dead people” is one of Hollywood’s most famous lines behind Casablanca’s “We’ll always have Paris.”)
Shymalan incredible comeback will put him back on top. He’ll be seeing more than ‘dead people,’ he’ll also be seeing box office dollar signs…come this weekend. 3 tiaras