Glass Review: Superheroes Aren't Enough to Save the Finale of M. Night Shyamalan's Trilogy

One of the greatest ironies in pop culture is how, for all of their phenomenal reach and impact, superhero comic books—the sort that get made into the world's highest-grossing movies year after year—don't actually sell well. The imperfect numbers we have aren't terribly impressive. When it comes to copies shipped, most of the hundreds of comics released don't ever crack six figures in a given month. It's hard to make any analysis off such rough data that implies such a small audience, but we know enough to assert one thing: superhero movies do not translate to people rushing into comic stores and buying comics at $3.99 a pop every month. The comics shop win few souls.

So there's really no reason for a comic book shop to show up in Glass, the conclusion to M. Night Shyamalan's unlikely-yet-wholly unique ad-hoc superhero trilogy, but on multiple occasions, characters just wander into them. It's almost as if to Shyamalan, the comics shop still holds some tremendous sway over our souls as a symbol of some agnostic spiritual yearning; as if we're lured there in moments of crisis to try and figure out our own moral universe. He might be onto something, even if his own movie undermines him at every turn. The comics shop in Glass stocks more Funko Pop! figures than it does comics, after all.

I bring up all this comic book errata because Glass itself does. It's the third part in a trilogy, sure, but it's also a movie that wants to delve deep into why we care about superhero comics and movies, picking up threads from Shyamalan's 2000 masterpiece Unbreakable that were largely shelved for its stealth sequel Split—a film that didn't reveal it was a sequel until its last sixty seconds. And while you probably could follow Glass easily enough without having seen the previous two films, unless you've seen them, it's unlikely that you'll care, or vibe with their take on comic book style mythology.

Without all that context, Glass is just an okay thriller with a good first half and a remarkably incoherent second one, a film that wants to both take the piss out of superhero cinema and also lovingly pay homage to it at the same time. Put aside all of its comics pablum—and there is a lot of it; characters will actually announce out loud a comic book trope as it happens—and you have a film that actively frustrates. Characters make crucial discoveries before utterly disappearing until the plot needs them. The timeline is barely comprehensible, with twists so openly telegraphed they'd have saved the Titanic.

This is particularly egregious, because Glass is a really simple film. David Dunn (Bruce Willis) is an indestructible vigilante who hunts down criminals in a poncho using leads he cobbles together from police reports and psychic flashes he receives when he makes contact with people. His latest target is The Horde (James McAvoy), a man with a form of extreme dissociative identity disorder that makes him assume any one of over a dozen personalities working together to appease one monstrous superhuman persona known as The Beast, which has a penchant for murdering young girls. It's also a surprisingly small part of the film—Dunn catches the Horde, but both get caught by police early on. Most of the film is a slow-burn psychological thriller as Dunn is reunited with his nemesis from Unbreakable, the fragile-boned mastermind Elijah "Mr. Glass" Price, under the care of Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) a psychologist who believes that Dunn, the Horde, and Glass aren't really superhuman, but suffering under delusions brought about by trauma. She wants to cure them, but Mr. Glass has other plans—and he's much smarter.

Unfortunately, McAvoy is the only actor that seems like he's having any fun, cycling through personas with an impish delight and impressive physicality. Ironically, he gets most of the screentime in Glass—which is ultimately for the best, as everyone else in this movie comes across as strangely languid and sleepy in a way that's truly disappointing given how good everyone involved is.

But what really does Glass in is, simply, time. When Unbreakable was released nineteen years ago, it was a movie that took superheroes seriously in an industry that largely did not. It was a grounded film about the idea of comic book heroes, about men and women with ideals so clear they'd wear them on their chest, with convictions and insecurities that gave people literal powers and weaknesses that drove them to altruism or villainy. It set all this against a world that was pretty much ours, one too murky and messy for us to believe such people could even feasibly live, let alone fly. And, like in comic books, Unbreakable's twin character study of David Dunn's invulnerable alienation and Elijah "Mr. Glass" Price's hyper-fragile isolation gave us cause, with its final twist, for both hope and heartbreak.

But not only is the world itself drastically different in 2019, superheroes are too. They're everywhere. There's no mystery to them. Conjuring up their image is not drawing upon some secret, unknown strength, but rather some of the most familiar iconography in pop culture. And in this context expectations are different, and the qualifications for deconstruction are steeper. It's a film nearly twenty years in the making that doesn't bother to acknowledge the last twenty years.

In that regard, Glass is just like the superhero comics it points to; the disconnect between the seemingly feeble reach they have and their outsize influence on screens large and small, is, in a real-life twist, even bigger than it seems. Because while the audience for comics is dwindling, it's merely the audience for one kind of comic book. The kind that brought you into comics shops week after week, to follow the adventures of any given Marvel or DC hero one issue at a time. The kind that was traditionally dominated by men, and becomes hostile when they feel they are not catered to. The kind that gets upset when a white character in a comic is portrayed by an actor of color in the movie adaptation.

Meanwhile, another audience is growing. They're buying armfuls of manga and graphic novels based on podcasts in stacks, and they don't have to go to comics shops to find them. The climax of Glass is one that hearkens to the cyclical nature of comics: beginnings and ends flow into one another, all part of a tradition bigger than any one person. In this, Glass makes its truest observation: one finale is often another's origin story. There's power to be found in the pages of a comic book, but that power has moved on. It's in hands far better than ours.