Glass

Shyamalan played with his child, for sure, but it’s hard to deny that it lacks the mystery of the “first part” and the surprise of the “second part”. The imaginary highlight of this rather chatty but well-written film is the conversation of all three protagonists in the pink cell of the psychiatric hospital. After that, you just count how many times The Beast will be on the scene and how many security guards he'll beat up. James McAvoy is superb in his role and it's worth going to the cinema for him alone, to see his performance on the big screen. (01/27/2019)

With the themes, the involvement of the three, Paulson's role in the action, and the plot arc (across the episodes as a whole, not just this one), this is undeniably an interesting yet logical culmination of the trilogy, and one that works particularly well on a meta level, as since Unbreakable, we are now in the "cinematic age of the superhero". That's exactly how it works in the fist hour, and with that in mind, it goes down some interesting paths where Shyamalan isn't afraid to toy with expectations. The problem, and quite a major one, is the second half, when it doesn't so much shift in place as shuffle backwards on a square inch. It unfolds hastily in scenes where you always know safely in advance what is going to happen and how it is going to happen and where it is going, so that sometimes you wait for tens of minutes before it finally happens and then it is explained to you at length. Even the potentially powerful "whispering to the trio" scenes are stripped down and not for a moment convincing. This is doubly disappointing, because the second half pretends "as if the whispering worked and made the people in question angry", which no one, thanks to the unconvincing delivery, can believe for a second. On paper, it all might have made sense to Shyamalan and seemed on the level of Unbreakable, but the execution stalls, and despite a solid pacing and a supportive overall plane, the crappy second half sinks it cruelly. It's not bad, it's not unintentionally funny, it's just very good at first before it becomes very boring. (02/07/2021)

The biggest flop of the year? Quite possibly. I saw the film in the cinema two weeks ago and it smoked out of my head so quickly that I'm only writing about it now, and that doesn't bode damn well. I don't know if Shyamalan has family problems, is drowning in debt or has turned to drugs because after The Visit and Split it looked like he was back to where we wanted him to be, but now he's plummeting down again and has made perhaps the most boring film I've ever seen in the cinema. The acting aces did not please at all. James McAvoy overacts horribly and is not interesting at all, Bruce Willis is a clear candidate to the Golden Raspberry and Samuel L. Jackson unfortunately didn't say much. The film offers almost nothing. It's not action, horror, thriller, funny or suspenseful. It fits the drama, but it's properly tedious, visually unappealing and strangely overwrought at the end. A strange, uninteresting and unentertaining film and I hate that wholeheartedly. I felt like I went to a restaurant and ordered a beef steak medium well with mushrooms, asparagus and chips and ended up getting a steak well done with roast potatoes, carrots and salad. This is not how I imagined my first cinema visit this year. 30% (02/08/2019)

I understand where the director was going with all of this. Unfortunately, I don’t really get how he filmed it. While  Unbreakable is a fundamental movie of American cinema in my eyes, and Split set out to be the same, Glass connected the stories of all participants in a way that was not only unnecessary but it also spoiled my impression of the two previous films, which ended perfectly… and should have remained that way. But M. Night Shyamalan turned his superheroes into such strange figures that even though I still liked James McAvoy’s unrestrained acting, the movie as a whole made me really unhappy. It felt like a complete mess. But it’s still Shyamalan, so if you can endure the boring madhouse-like middle of the move, the finale can be quite intriguing from a screenwriting perspective. You certainly have to give him that. (06/14/2019)

This era calls for a strong stance against movies that divide the audience, and rather than beginning to accommodate such cases, it is easier to start laughing at them. Glass,  just like The Sixth Sense was in its time, is a film for patient viewers, but it doesn't suit today's trends too well. M. Night Shyamalan brings back that slow pacing and uniqueness, and while most of the running time promises a new generation of comic books, in the end, it brings the opposite, with an anti-comic-book whose finale kicks even the slightly sympathetic viewer directly in the tenders. With the help of perfectly used flashbacks, I have to admit that I simply wasn't prepared for some points, and although I don't think everything was planned like this twenty years ago, I would believe that what the creator carried in his head for years as a continuation of the Unbreakable relationship between David and Elijah should have looked just like this, and Kevin served as the ideal trigger for it. There is no room for digressions here, so I have to smirk at the complaints about the sequels or spin-offs we are now supposed to expect. They'll never come, and they shouldn't. Everything has been said, to the very last drop. And I'm giving it the highest rating, even though I'm not sure I can ever come back here again, and even though everything inside me was hurting when I left the cinema. (01/24/2019)