by Zach Smith-Michaels
Imagine you run into an old friend from high school. You haven’t seen them in many years. You got along for a while, but towards the end of high school maybe you guys didn’t end on great terms. However, in recent years you saw on Facebook that this friend of yours was doing well and they reached out to you about coming over for dinner. You show up at their house, and their house is beautiful! They really have an eye for detail. Now, you start talking to them, and that’s when you realize that you really don’t have anything to say to each other, but you smell something delicious in the kitchen. You can’t wait to see what they are cooking. Finally they bring the dish out and it’s McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets that they threw in the toaster. You guess this is fine and you think “Maybe I shouldn’t of expected too much”, but then you remember that they always made incredible desserts. Although the evening has been “fine”, you’re waiting for that crowd pleasing finale. Dessert is served, and it’s a soy based, vegan, vanilla frozen yogurt. That bizarre and overly lengthy analogy is exactly what the movie Glass is.
Does this movie suck? Nah. Does Glass cement Shyamalan’s return to form? Not for me it doesn’t. This movie, in a word, is fine…and maybe that’s the problem. When it comes to Shyamalan you want either greatness or garbage. You want your mind to be blown with a great plot twist or to be baffled by an absolutely bizarre mess. Glass offers neither.
Unbreakable is a very interesting and entertaining film. I saw this movie at youth group when I was about 12, and I found the characters to be rich, the story thoughtful, and the plot twist was a home run! I thought that Split was a great psychological thriller with a terrific performance from James McAvoy. Glass couldn’t lose! There were so many directions where this film could have gone, but Shyamalan decided to keep the film in neutral.
Look, I can’t say that this film isn’t well directed, because Glass is very well directed! He’s a much better directed than he is a writer. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Know thyself! This films succumbs to some classic, clunky Shyamalan dialogue.
The performances (with the exception of McAvoy) were all mediocre. No one knocked my socks off in this movie. Yes, McAvoy is great, but you’ve already seen this exact same performance in Split. Willis and Jackson were perfectly fine. Anya Taylor-Joy is begging for her career to take off, Spencer Treat Clark is hoping that this will lead to his resurgence into cinema, but no one is going to blow your mind.
Look. Whatever. You wanna see this movie? You might like it, you may not, but I don’t know if anyone is really going to care that much.