Glass

Following one bomb after another during a 15-year stretch, in 2017, M. Night Shyamalan showed us he was still capable of good cinematic things with Split—a showcase for James McAvoy’s multi-persona performance and a creepy little thriller thanks to Shyamalan’s surprisingly deft direction. An after-credits scene showed us Bruce Willis as David Dunn, his superhumanly strong Unbreakable character, and the possibilities became very intriguing. The director announced his intention to make Glass and that Split was, in fact, the second part of what would be a trilogy. Glass would bring back the brittle-boned character of that name played by Samuel L. Jackson in Unbreakable, along with Willis and the newly introduced McAvoy character(s). OK, sounds good. Let’s go! Well … shit. 2019 has its first legitimate clunker. Shyamalan is up to his old tricks again—the kind of loopy, half-assed filmmaking that made the world scratch its collective head with The Happening, The Village, The Last Airbender, After Earth and Lady in the Water—all wretched stink bombs. He has a remarkable ability to employ both lazy and overambitious writing simultaneously. He puts a lot in play with Glass but doesn’t seem to have a distinct idea of where to take it. Plot holes abound like wolf spider offspring jumping from their momma’s back when you slam a shoe down on her. There are so many, it’s hard to keep track of them.