Director M. Night Shyamalan had a huge hit with one of his first films ‘The Sixth Sense’, about a young boy who sees dead people. He’s now back a film with another supernatural theme called ‘Glass.’
Shyamalan has yet to repeat the success of ‘The Sixth Sense.’ He is very consistent in coming out with a film every two years or so, but the quality of his films seems to be getting worse and worse. ‘Glass’ is the third (and hopefully last) film in the fictitious Eastrail #177 train derailment series.
The series, which includes the 2000 film ‘Unbreakable’ and the 2016 film ‘Split, is where multiple characters have some sort of connection to the train disaster. But these characters are not normal people – they are superheroes with powers that they use for reasons that have never really been clear to me.
In ‘Glass’, which mostly takes place in a mental institution conveniently overlooking downtown Philadelphia, reunites Bruce Willis, James McAvoy and Samuel Jackson as the same characters from the previous films. Irrelevant of the plots of the first two films, ‘Glass’ is as silly and unbelievable as anything you would’ve seen at the cinema in years. All the characters wind up in the same mental institution, coincidentally, where there is not much staff on duty and the three of them seem to have free reign of the place.
A psychiatrist (a dismal Sarah Paulson) wants to convince all the men that they suffer from delusion (which is far far from the truth – can’t she see this?). Each of the men has, conveniently, one person who comes to visit them – all with some knowledge of their ‘illness.’ It all boils down to one messy showdown in the front parking lot of the institution and the view of the opening of a new downtown skyscraper which is talked about during the film quite a lot but doesn’t seem to have any connection at all to the characters. It’s all one big silly mess, and the people I saw it with (fellow film critics) shook their head as they walked out of the cinema. Avoid this one, please.
Reviewed by Tim Baros