Review #1,470: 'Glass' (2019)

When M. Night Shyamalan's Split came out three years ago, I doubt anybody was expecting what appeared to be a relatively low-key kidnap thriller to eventually reveal itself as a supervillain origin story of sorts, as well as a sequel to the director's finest film, Unbreakable, released a whopping 16 years previous. Despite its flaws, Split was a success with audiences, and it seemed that Shyamalan's reputation - relegated to near-joke status following a string of utter stinkers like Lady in the Water, The Happening and The Last Airbender - was starting to claw its way back to the dizzy heights of his early career, when he was dubbed the next Steven Spielberg after scaring audiences with The Sixth Sense and, to a lesser degree, Signs. Shyamalan doesn't do middle-of-the-road. He's either at the top of his game or testing our patience, but Glass, the inevitable third instalment of this 19-years-in-the-making trilogy, may be the first time he's dabbled with both extremes.

Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), the abusive victim whose 23 other personalities serve to protect him, is still at large. His activities have led to the press dubbing him 'The Horde', and he is currently holed up with four young cheerleaders, the next potential victims of his cannibalistic hunger and his most feared personality of all, the hulking 'Beast'. Meanwhile, super-strong David Dunn (Bruce Willis) juggles his time between running a security business with his son Joseph (an all-grown-up Spencer Treat Clark), and fighting crime.

On top of being damn near indestructible, David - named 'The Overseer' by fans of his work - can also sniff out crime by mere touch, and a chance encounter with Crumb leads him to an abandoned warehouse, where the girls wait bound and terrified. The two superhumans slug it out, but before one can outmatch the other, they are set on by a SWAT team directed by the unnervingly mild-mannered psychologist Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson). She specialises in cases in which the patient believes they are a comic-book character, and takes David and Kevin to a grungy institution where an old friend awaits them.

The old friend, of course, is Samuel L. Jackon's Elijah Price, aka Mr. Glass, named after the rare brittle-bone disease from which he suffers. Split is still fresh in the memory, but if - like me - you haven't seen Unbreakable since it was released 19 years ago, it may take a while to fill in the blanks, because Shyamalan isn't willing to refresh your memory. Glass was an intriguing (and surprising) foe for David last time around, but would a man who is simply more intelligent than most really be lumped into the same category as a man who can survive a train crash and another who can scale bare walls? Nevertheless, the actors are all on top form, with Willis' gruff, underplayed performance finding a nice balance with McAvoy's manic character-switching, and when he isn't being laboured with exposition, Jackson has fun as the guy who is always one step ahead.

The strength of the performances makes it seem as though all of the movie's budget went into paying the actors to up their game, as it's difficult to judge where else it was spent. The first two-thirds builds an intriguing atmosphere, despite spending too much time pondering the question of what it would be like if superheroes really existed (doesn't every superhero film tackle this in one form or another?). Shyamalan blows it in the last act, delivering an underwhelming showdown that will leave audiences wondering what the hell the writer/director was thinking. It won't have many calling for more from this unexpected cinematic universe, but it's certainly worth a gamble.


Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: James McAvoy, Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sarah Paulson, Spencer Treat Clark, Charlayne Woodard
Country: USA

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie

Review #1,191: 'Split' (2016)

To say that the output of writer/director M. Night Shyamalan has been on a steady decline since his hit debut The Sixth Sense in 1999 would be a little bit of an understatement. While The Sixth Sense and his next feature Unbreakable (2000) had people announcing him as the next Steven Spielberg, the likes of Lady in the Water (2006) and, especially, The Happening (2008) left audiences scratching their heads at how this once-wunderkind could become such an absolute laughing stock. Each of his subsequent movies were inevitably built-up as the one in which Shyamalan would re-discover his form, only for them to receive a panning commercially and critically. However, it would seem that Shyamalan has finally located a smidgen of the talent teased in his early works with Split, a routine kidnapped-girls-in-peril horror elevated by an outstanding central performance.

Friends Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula), along with 'weird' outsider Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), are kidnapped in brought daylight by a stern-looking bespectacled man. They are locked in a windowless room by their captor, seemingly without any hope of escape. The girls soon to become puzzled by their abductor, who is a buttoned-up OCD-sufferer one minute, and speaking warmly while dressed in women's clothes the next. He also appears to them as a lisping, goofy 9 year old boy, and through the man's psychiatrist Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), we learn that the man, whose real name is Kevin, suffers from dissociative identity disorder (DID), and is harbouring 23 different personalities. He appears to Fletcher as Barry, but the doctor suspects that new personalities have emerged as dominant and that they putting the pieces in place for the arrival of a mysterious 24th personality, known as The Beast.

There is a fundamental issue with the characters of Split, and it's that the only one who truly matters is James McAvoy's Kevin, and the many personalities associated with him. Everyone else is reduced to either skimpily-clad horror-bait or exposition tool. The one exception is Casey, whose troubled background could mean that she shares more in common with her captor than we initially realise, but the film relies too heavily on lingering close-ups and clunky flashbacks to make any real impact. The other girls are only there to frustrate the audience with their terrible escape plans and inexplicably lose their clothing. Split is far more interesting when away from the kidnap plot and delving into the film's speculation on the potential of DID sufferers. Fletcher believes that different personalities can have different physical ailments, for example one could be paraplegic and the other able to run great distances, and theorises that they could even possess untapped powers. It's just a shame that her character is designed to do little more than explain this to us.

Yet while all the Shyamalan tics we've come to know and hate are present and annoying - such as his obligatory cameo and nails-down-a-blackboard dialogue spoken in the real world by nobody ever - Split really comes alive when McAvoy is on screen. He is scary, charming and funny, often all at once. In one scene, he dances around a character to pumping techno music, and this could be viewed as a suitable metaphor for how McAvoy puts his supporting cast to shame. This being Shyamalan, there is the inevitable twist ending, although it is not one that you could possibly guess. Just when I was at the point of thinking that he had gone and taken a story of potential and ran way too far with it, the final scene made me completely re-evaluate the entire movie. Don't get me wrong, it's nothing particularly clever, but it is a nice little bit of fan-service that helps put the movie into perspective and, I admit, left me giddy. Shyamalan is not "back to his best", and I think it's quite clear he never will be, but Split has at least got me somewhat excited for his next film. He'll never be forgiven for The Happening though.


Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy, Betty Buckley, Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula
Country: USA

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie

Review #362: 'The Happening' (2008)

After the massive success of the hugely over-rated debut feature, The Sixth Sense (1999), M. Night Shyamalan could only really go one way. The series of films that he produced over the years have always been absolutely reliant on a twist, or put simply, one single idea, that the film's entire narrative is hinged upon. In his first the lead character was dead, in Unbreakable (2000), the lead was an unwitting superhero, in The Village (2004), it was the media signifiers of the war on terror. In essence the films were quite interesting. However, as films they were largely dull, pretentious drivel. I never actually saw Lady in the Water (2006), so I am unable to comment on the film he directed before this atrociously titled, The Happening.

The film begins with a series of vignettes showing various New Yorker's stopping their movements, and randomly committing suicide. One scene has workmen jumping from the room of a tall building - the director sorely missing out on the opportunity to have The Weather Girls' It's Raining Men playing on a radio, or even with non-diegesis. So, what about that old Shyamalan twist that has become so ubiquitous to 21st cinema thus far? The plants did it! The plants are attacking the entire eastern seaboard of North America, and a struggling couple, Elliot (Mark Wahlberg) and Alma (Zooey Deschanel) have been given a friends child Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) to take to safety after her father, John Leguizamo, - who willingly manages to slit his wrists, successfully ejecting himself from this awful film - goes off in search of the mother.

Shyamanlan proudly highlights his involvement in his films, with his credits for writing, producing and directing, and his career path would seem to indicate that he combats outside forces in their making. If this is the case, I would state that for his careers sake, he should absolutely make other peoples scripts. For me, I don't really care, having never really liked any of his films. It would appear that the gravitas of the attention he received after The Sixth Sense, (being hailed as the new Spielberg; the wunderkind status in the media) clearly have hindered his films. And as I watched Wahlberg and Deschanel, zombie-like in their delivery of some very poor "relationship" dialogue, and the pathetic narrative of plant spores evolving to drive humans to suicide as a defence, I wondered to myself: Why on earth is this man still making movies? We should relegate him to television reality shows: When Botany Goes Mad!


Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo
Country: USA/India/France

Rating: *

Marc Ivamy