Glass (2019)
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
In a series of escalating encounters, former security guard David Dunn uses his supernatural abilities to track Kevin Wendell Crumb, a disturbed man who has twenty-four personalities. Meanwhile, the shadowy presence of Elijah Price emerges as an orchestrator who holds secrets critical to both men.
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33 films that influenced Glass
What critics say influenced Glass
Long after “Unbreakable” (2000) came “Split” (2016).
The scene comes around the midpoint of M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass, the concluding part of what’s been referred to as his “Eastrail 177 trilogy,” named after the deadly train derailment that sets the plot of his beguiling modern fairy tale Unbreakable (2000) into motion and provides the backstory for his bugnuts low-budget hit Split (2016).
Harking all the way back to Shyamalan's 2000 film Unbreakable, Glass is the film designed to bring together the stories of McAvoy's unhinged killer, Bruce Willis's reluctant hero and Samuel L Jackson's evil genius.
Unbreakable was a film a little too ahead of its time, deconstructing the mythos of superheroes several years before the genre found solid footing in the modern cinema landscape.
19 years ago director M. Night Shyamalan made “Unbreakable,” a unique take on the very idea of comic book personas.
This is what happens to the storyline in M. Night Shyamalan’s crushingly disappointing “Glass” — the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle of a trilogy that kicked off with the brilliantly constructed classic “Unbreakable” in 2000 and took us by surprise with the jagged and twisted (in more ways than one) horrors of “Split” in 2016.
It’s hard to overstate what a big deal Shyamalan was in the years that followed the success of The Sixth Sense (1999), or how hard his reputation tanked after The Lady in the Water (2006) and the misunderstood drive-in homage The Happening (2008).
Willis’s Malcolm Crowe in The Sixth Sense missed a doozy.)
In the fictionalized version of this story, his new film, “Glass,” would complete the return to pop-culture grace from which the director fell in the years after “The Sixth Sense” in 1999, years in which movies like “The Village,” “The Happening,” “The Last Airbender,” and “After Earth” were rightly or wrongly mocked into oblivion.
In 1999's The Sixth Sense, still the director's most accomplished film, it was his care in exploring the psyche of little Cole Sear, not the dramatic twist ending, that established him as a major talent to watch (even if the twist got all the credit).
Long ago, the director displayed a knack for teasing out tension, and it worked just enough times (The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village if we’re being generous) that producers kept hoping for more.
Followers of his work were misguided to ever anoint him the next Spielberg, which many did after The Sixth Sense, but he’s also more talented than the punch line he became in the mid-aughts.
Long after “Unbreakable” (2000) came “Split” (2016).
The scene comes around the midpoint of M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass, the concluding part of what’s been referred to as his “Eastrail 177 trilogy,” named after the deadly train derailment that sets the plot of his beguiling modern fairy tale Unbreakable (2000) into motion and provides the backstory for his bugnuts low-budget hit Split (2016).
Glass, by director M. Night Shyamalan, concludes a trilogy nobody knew was a trilogy until the final moments of his previous film, Split.
Then suddenly, Split came out and not only revitalised Shyamalan’s reputation as a filmmaker, but was the surprise sequel to Unbreakable all along!
Shyamalan returned to the world of this story with 2017’s “Split,” which introduced a new villain into the mix, a multi-personality lunatic played by James McAvoy .
This is what happens to the storyline in M. Night Shyamalan’s crushingly disappointing “Glass” — the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle of a trilogy that kicked off with the brilliantly constructed classic “Unbreakable” in 2000 and took us by surprise with the jagged and twisted (in more ways than one) horrors of “Split” in 2016.
Stripped of the surrounding darkness of that magnitude, McAvoy’s emoting this time around feels more hammy, more akin to watching Eddie Murphy don the disguises in such low-rent efforts as Norbit and Nutty Professor II: The Klumps .
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Sleight-of-hand camerawork, not unlike what Spielberg did with the shark in Jaws, gives The Beast much of his unsettling power.
Stripped of the surrounding darkness of that magnitude, McAvoy’s emoting this time around feels more hammy, more akin to watching Eddie Murphy don the disguises in such low-rent efforts as Norbit and Nutty Professor II: The Klumps .
Bruce Willis plays Dunn as tired, worn-out, and world-weary – a facet that borrows a little John McClane and combines it with Hugh Jackman from Logan.
The early scenes of “Glass” charmingly resemble a bargain-basement “Spider-Man,” as Willis’ David — or the Overseer, to go by his vigilante-hero moniker — dons a hooded poncho and patrols the streets of Philadelphia, using his telepathic powers to sniff out criminal activity.
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For years, David Dunn (Bruce Willis, “Death Wish”) has been using his security system company as a base of operations from which to continue using his powers to fight crime.
Just as he did last year in that unfortunate Death Wish remake, Willis plays a vigilante and sleepwalks through the part.
In when Unbreakable released in 2000 , the only mainstream superhero films at that point where the Superman films, Batman films and X-Men.