M. Night Shyamalan\u2019s Unbreakable<\/i> was arguably years ahead of its time. Released in 2000, five years before Christopher Nolan\u2019s Batman Begins<\/i>, Shyamalan\u2019s low-key superhero\/supervillain origin story was the sort of grounded comic book film that studios are still trying (and failing) to make. With his 2017 psychological thriller Split<\/i>, the writer\/director upped the ante considerably, feeling like a natural escalation of the themes he explored in Unbreakable<\/i> while slyly establishing an entirely original universe within which the filmmaker could continue to play. As teased in Split<\/i>\u2019s final moments, Shyamalan has finally combined the casts of both films into one epic thriller with Glass<\/i><\/strong>, pitting heroes against villains while exploring the complexity of both and serving as a deconstruction\/commentary on the now-prolific superhero blockbuster genre.<\/span><\/p>\n In the years since the events of Unbreakable<\/i>, the near-immortal David Dunn (Bruce Willis) has opened a home security store with son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark); by night, he\u2019s become a self-styled vigilante referred to by the media as \u201cThe Overseer.\u201d Glass<\/i> is quick to pick up where Split<\/i> left off, with the more deviant or \u201cundesirable\u201d of Kevin Wendell Crumb\u2019s (James McAvoy) 24 personalities — known collectively as \u201cThe Horde\u201d — still kidnapping young women as food for the animalistic identity they call \u201cThe Beast.\u201d Early in the first act, David rescues the teen girls and goes toe-to-toe with The Beast, but their super-powered fight is cut short by the arrival of a SWAT team led by Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson),\u00a0a psychologist who specializes in a very specific disorder, in which mentally ill people have come to believe that they have superpowers.<\/span><\/p>\n The bulk of Glass<\/i> subsequently takes place in a mental hospital, where David and Kevin are locked away alongside Samuel L. Jackson\u2019s hyper-frail Elijah Price, kept under constant sedation in order to subdue his exceptional intelligence. Nonetheless, the notorious \u201cMr. Glass\u201d remains ever the mastermind of this larger comics-riffing narrative, so it\u2019s not long before he frees himself and sets about teaming up with The Beast in an effort to fight David in full view of the public,\u00a0so as to prove that superheroes and villains do<\/i> in fact walk among us. <\/span><\/p>\n Glass<\/i> maintains the campier qualities of Split<\/i>, along with its deeper themes regarding the ways in which that trauma is processed and internalized. Anya Taylor-Joy fittingly reprises her role as Casey Cooke, the lone survivor from the events of Split<\/i>, only able to endure because The Beast sensed that she had likewise experienced severe trauma and had her own deeply felt strength as a result. As a culmination of the earlier films, Shyamalan\u2019s trilogy-capper distills the technical and thematic elements of each, though the heavy-handed approach of Unbreakable<\/i> is occasionally a little too<\/i> present here, as with an overly lingering close-up on a photo of Joseph Dunn at Casey\u2019s high school. It\u2019s not exactly a hindrance to a film so committed to all the self-aware camp that entails. Shyamalan remains preoccupied with the idea that there is no such thing as coincidence, that everything is connected. When we watch a Marvel or DC Comics movie, we readily accept these plot contrivances, however far-fetched they might be. In a \u201cgrounded\u201d world such as the one established over these three films, it may be a more difficult pill to swallow, although that\u2019s exactly the point in some respects.<\/span><\/p>\n As with Split<\/i>, a huge part of what makes Glass<\/i> work lies with the casting. McAvoy is once again exceptional, delivering a multi-faceted series of performances that effortlessly transition from one to the next; Jackson infuses his role as the mastermind who schemed to bring such opposing forces together with a subtle element of tragedy and heartache (the film is similarly deft at combating the binary thinking of \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cevil\u201d with thoughtful nuance); hell, even Willis actually appears to be awake<\/i> during his scenes for the first time in far too long. But it\u2019s the scenes between Kevin and Casey that give this entry a healthy dose of heart and realism. Taylor-Joy and McAvoy brilliantly sell the emotional connection between these two abuse victims, lending a real sense of consequence to Kevin\u2019s story arc.<\/span><\/p>\n Glass<\/i> is a bold piece of work that pays off nearly twenty years of creative investment in surprisingly beautiful and entertaining ways. While some may find Shyamalan\u2019s aesthetic and tonal choices to be too heavy-handed, others will appreciate Glass<\/i> as the clever, campy work of a die-hard cinephile \u2014 maybe even a kindred spirit.<\/span><\/p>\n M. Night Shyamalan\u2019s Unbreakable was arguably years ahead of its time. Released in 2000, five years before Christopher Nolan\u2019s Batman […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":553,"featured_media":11145,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,340],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/553"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11144\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Grade: A-<\/span><\/h3>\n
2 hrs., 8 min.; rated PG-13 for\u00a0violence including some bloody images, thematic elements, and language<\/em><\/h5>\n
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