Glass
I apparently have a pathological inability to not talk about the latest superhero movies on my blog, here are a few quick thoughts on M Night (or as my pal, Dr. Jan Itor calls him, "mmm") Shyamalan's latest.
I won't be giving away much beyond what the trailers and synopses already suggest but if you want to know absolutely nothing going in, maybe read this after seeing the film.
Despite churning out more bad films in a row than almost anyone this side of Ed Wood, Uwe Boll and Michael Bay, M Night Shyamalan's film career was somehow not capsized by the chain of disasters that was Lady in the Water, the Last Airbender, and the Happening or even after that final explosion of shrieking awfulness: After Earth. These easily rank among the (inoffensive but still) worst films ever made and it's a wonder that Shyamalan was still able to find funding to do his thing.
Amazingly, though, after a decade in the dumps, the man who I really can't help but call "mmm" made an honest-to-goodness comeback with the solid horror of The Visit and the flat-out massively enjoyable, Split - which, as everyone knows, turned out to be the sequel to what was once his most underrated film, Unbreakable. For the first time in what felt like forever, a new mmm film was something to eagerly await rather than dread.
More than that, anyone who has been paying even the slightest attention to the latter-day film career of Bruce Willis couldn't help but be at least somewhat hopeful that reuniting with the guy who gave him a couple of his best ever roles would finally pull a decent performance out of the man who was once John McClane but was now most just John Meh-Clain. Seriously, however bad mmm's films were over that dark decade, you could at least respect the fact that he was clearly trying. For Willis, though, everything since Moonrise Kingdom (trust Wes Anderson to get the last good performance out of him) has seen him sleep-walking through one generic action-thriller after another.
The good news, then, is that mmm didn't entirely drop the ball here. Glass is, frankly, a bit of a failure but it is a failure with some very good things in it and, when it does fail, it does so with a certain amount of interest and ambition. Not so much in the requisite badly-acted cameo from mmm himself, which is even more pointless than usual, or in his usual tin-ear for dialogue but in the sense that, like Unbreakable, he has gone out of his way to deliver something that is anything but a generic superhero movie - something that is far more impressive now than it was nineteen years ago when there weren't at least a half dozen superhero films released a year.
The first two-thirds of the film, in fact, are really rather good (some lame dialogue and acting, aside) as the showdown between Willis' David Dunn aka the Overseer and McAvoy's Kevin Wendall Crumb aka the Horde happens right at the beginning of the film and is handled with a gritty brutality that reminds us that these superhumans are far more grounded in their powers than their more famous counterparts from Marvel and DC.
The film then moves the action to a mental asylum where Dunn, Crumb, and a heavily sedated Elijah Price (Sam Jackson so... probably not sedated for too long then) are treated by Sarah Paulson's Dr. Ellie Staple who questions whether these people are superheroes at all or very slightly gifted but ultimately regular people suffering from delusions of grandeur. This second act is even better, giving us a more psychological take on superhero archetypes and the claustrophobic setting rachets up the tension nicely.
There are some solid plotholes along the way and I don't really think that mmm knows comics quite as much as he professes to in this film but, overall, so far so good. Then comes the third act (no spoilers here) that is by turns massively stupid, misguidedly ambitious (he tries to introduce a whole new mythology that comes far too late in the franchise to work) and still pretty fun in a goofy kind of way. It does sink everything that came before, to be honest, but though this is another pointless Shyamalan twist, it left me laughing with incredulity rather than angry or, worse, bored like so many of his past films.
And then there's the Bruce Willis problem. While Paulson, Jackson and, most especially, McAvoy throw themselves into their roles with a certain relish, Willis looks as bored as ever. He's in a far better film than most of the stuff he has done of late but he just seems, once again, unengaged by the material here and is completely overshadowed by his co-stars. Despite the title, this is once again McAvoy's film and no matter what else it might get wrong, it's totally worth watching just for him gleefully switching between a couple of dozen personalities; often doing so at the flick of a literal light switch.
Glass is a mixed bag, in other words, and if you come in expecting something on the level of Unbreakable, you're bound to be disappointed. On the other hands, it's still a million times better and, crucially, more enjoyable than mmm's truly bad films. I guess it's true, if you make a film as hopelessly terrible as After Earth, there really is nowhere to go but up, up, up.
I won't be giving away much beyond what the trailers and synopses already suggest but if you want to know absolutely nothing going in, maybe read this after seeing the film.
Amazingly, though, after a decade in the dumps, the man who I really can't help but call "mmm" made an honest-to-goodness comeback with the solid horror of The Visit and the flat-out massively enjoyable, Split - which, as everyone knows, turned out to be the sequel to what was once his most underrated film, Unbreakable. For the first time in what felt like forever, a new mmm film was something to eagerly await rather than dread.
More than that, anyone who has been paying even the slightest attention to the latter-day film career of Bruce Willis couldn't help but be at least somewhat hopeful that reuniting with the guy who gave him a couple of his best ever roles would finally pull a decent performance out of the man who was once John McClane but was now most just John Meh-Clain. Seriously, however bad mmm's films were over that dark decade, you could at least respect the fact that he was clearly trying. For Willis, though, everything since Moonrise Kingdom (trust Wes Anderson to get the last good performance out of him) has seen him sleep-walking through one generic action-thriller after another.
The good news, then, is that mmm didn't entirely drop the ball here. Glass is, frankly, a bit of a failure but it is a failure with some very good things in it and, when it does fail, it does so with a certain amount of interest and ambition. Not so much in the requisite badly-acted cameo from mmm himself, which is even more pointless than usual, or in his usual tin-ear for dialogue but in the sense that, like Unbreakable, he has gone out of his way to deliver something that is anything but a generic superhero movie - something that is far more impressive now than it was nineteen years ago when there weren't at least a half dozen superhero films released a year.
The first two-thirds of the film, in fact, are really rather good (some lame dialogue and acting, aside) as the showdown between Willis' David Dunn aka the Overseer and McAvoy's Kevin Wendall Crumb aka the Horde happens right at the beginning of the film and is handled with a gritty brutality that reminds us that these superhumans are far more grounded in their powers than their more famous counterparts from Marvel and DC.
The film then moves the action to a mental asylum where Dunn, Crumb, and a heavily sedated Elijah Price (Sam Jackson so... probably not sedated for too long then) are treated by Sarah Paulson's Dr. Ellie Staple who questions whether these people are superheroes at all or very slightly gifted but ultimately regular people suffering from delusions of grandeur. This second act is even better, giving us a more psychological take on superhero archetypes and the claustrophobic setting rachets up the tension nicely.
There are some solid plotholes along the way and I don't really think that mmm knows comics quite as much as he professes to in this film but, overall, so far so good. Then comes the third act (no spoilers here) that is by turns massively stupid, misguidedly ambitious (he tries to introduce a whole new mythology that comes far too late in the franchise to work) and still pretty fun in a goofy kind of way. It does sink everything that came before, to be honest, but though this is another pointless Shyamalan twist, it left me laughing with incredulity rather than angry or, worse, bored like so many of his past films.
And then there's the Bruce Willis problem. While Paulson, Jackson and, most especially, McAvoy throw themselves into their roles with a certain relish, Willis looks as bored as ever. He's in a far better film than most of the stuff he has done of late but he just seems, once again, unengaged by the material here and is completely overshadowed by his co-stars. Despite the title, this is once again McAvoy's film and no matter what else it might get wrong, it's totally worth watching just for him gleefully switching between a couple of dozen personalities; often doing so at the flick of a literal light switch.
Glass is a mixed bag, in other words, and if you come in expecting something on the level of Unbreakable, you're bound to be disappointed. On the other hands, it's still a million times better and, crucially, more enjoyable than mmm's truly bad films. I guess it's true, if you make a film as hopelessly terrible as After Earth, there really is nowhere to go but up, up, up.
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