Review Megathread: Glass

Rotten Tomatoes: 40%Metacritic: 42/100Written Reviews:Empire - Nick De SemlyenShyamalan remains an ambitious, interesting director, shooting close-ups with Dutch angles and embuing even the talky scenes with a palpable sense of trepidation. But his writing here often doesn’t hit the target; where Unbreakable was a smart, simmering deconstruction of comic-book tropes, Glass veers towards the heavy-handed, with characters disseminating his ideas through clumsy dialogue. And the eventful last 20 minutes offers both big moments that are confident, surprising and thought-provoking, and a flurry of laughably ridiculous twists. Despite boasting some fine performances and dread-ridden atmosphere, then, the film is sadly less than the sum of its parts. At least a Scrunt doesn’t turn up in the final scene.Entertainment Weekly - Chris NashawatyAs a fan of both earlier movies (although I prefer the intellectual rug-pulling of Unbreakable to the grim, captivity-themed Split), seeing these three characters first assembled in the same room is thrilling. But Shyamalan doesn’t seem to know what to do with his dense mythology once he’s convened his long-awaited superhero loony-bin summit meeting. Instead of having his two earlier movies dovetail to create something deeper and richer, it quickly begins to feel like subtraction by addition.The Hollywood Reporter - John DeForeIn Glass, the writer-director aims to complete an opus much more ambitious than his breakthrough ghost story The Sixth Sense — still his only film that nearly everyone agrees works. As a trilogy-closer, it's a mixed bag, tying earlier narrative strands together pleasingly while working too hard (and failing) to convince viewers Shyamalan has something uniquely brainy to offer in the overpopulated arena of comics-inspired stories. Though satisfying enough to work at the multiplex, it doesn't erase memories of the ways that even movies before the abjectly awful After Earth and The Last Airbender made us wary of the words "a film by M. Night Shyamalan."IndieWire - David EhrlichIn “Unbreakable,” David and Elijah went together like a lock and key. Here, everyone feels like spare parts. For all of the endless blather about how comic books have the power to reveal all of our secret identities — one of Jackson’s pronouncements about the power of narrative tropes veers close to making “Glass” feel like the “Life Itself” of superhero movies — Shyamalan never meaningfully engages with the genre. And while his characters are meant to evoke classic superhero archetypes, their extreme lack of depth or development only calls attention to how far the form has come thanks to movies like “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”ScreenCrush - Matt SingerBy that point, a series of twists and a tonally baffling epilogue have pushed Glass from middling Shyamalan territory close to the lows of The Happening and The Last Airbender. M. Night Shyamalan is a gifted artist, but like most of the characters in the Glass series, he seems to have multiple identities, both good and bad, and you never know which one is going to show up. In the case of Glass, it’s the latter. When Unbreakable came out, it felt truly revolutionary. Given the visual and intellectual sophistication in the superhero movies Hollywood now churns out at a regular clip, Glass just doesn’t cut it.Slate - Sam AdamsOn a purely practical level, Glass is drawn-out and disjointed, with disparate plot threads (some of them leading to, yes, a perfunctory rug pull) that seem dictated more by its stars’ availability than narrative cohesion. But it’s also hard not to judge it against the movie it might have been. In 2000, Unbreakable felt like an anomaly, a superhero movie that steered clear of camp and dug into the genre’s bedrock. It could have been thrilling to extend that approach into 2019, where superheroes storm the multiplex on a monthly basis, and there’s no longer a need to laboriously explain the culture behind them. Unfortunately, it seems that laborious explanations are the part Shyamalan likes. He’s the evil mastermind detailing his plot for world domination, knowing that the villain’s monologue is a terrible cliché but unable to resist the urge.Uproxx - Mike RyanGlass is a fascinating movie. Now, having said that, I should quickly point out that I did not enjoy this movie and I consider it, after a 19-year wait, one of the biggest personal disappointments I’ve ever experienced in a theater. Do you ever have those moments while watching a movie where you want to like it so bad that you start making mental deals with yourself? Like, “Okay, well, that scene wasn’t the best but I’m sure there’s a reason.” Or, “Okay, well, the movie is over halfway done and nothing significant has really happened, but I bet the ending will make this all worth it.” Or, “I really like what M. Night Shyamalan has done lately so I have no doubt this movie will turn it around.” Then, eventually, you just give up and accept what you’re seeing right in front of your face. That’s kind of what it’s like watching Glass.Vanity Fair - Ricard LawsonIn that way, Glass is a bit of a vanity project, as so many Shyamalan films are. He’s happy as ever to revel in his designs, to breathlessly comment on the cleverness of his own construction. But his insights into superherodom’s conventions aren’t terribly deep or revelatory. Glass is simply Shyamalan giving a book report on the basic structure of comic-caper narratives. There’s something endearing about his eagerness to explain these simple things, to show us what he knows. But Glass still suffers for that pedantic self-seriousness. Regular moviegoers are so steeped in this stuff that we have it down by heart; we don’t really need the Nightsplaining.Variety - Owen GleibermanYet the movie, watchable as it is, is still a disappointment, because it extends and belabors the conceits of “Unbreakable” without the sensation of mystical dark discovery that made that film indelible. “Glass” is a sequel that feels more dutiful than necessary. It turns the earlier film’s ominous pop poetry into overexplicit blockbuster prose.Vox - Alissa WilkinsonGlass is more wrapped up in trying to cram two storylines together than in crafting its own, independently good one. Which is to say: Glass feels like fan service that tries too hard to replicate earlier success, and manages to diminish both Unbreakable and Split in retrospect. It’s a movie ostensibly interested in how comic book stories work, but it has the same problems as a lot of the comic book movies hitting the big screen these days. The big twist: Shyamalan seems to have not learned very much at all from his own movies.The Wrap - Monica CastilloPerformances aside, “Glass” is a pretty mixed bag of exposition-filled dull moments and pedantic dialogue. Shyamalan, who also wrote the movie, unloads comic-book knowledge at the expense of character development, going so far as to explain what a “showdown” is and having a character give a brief history of the comics medium, which seems extraneous in a world where superhero movies have opened in theaters every summer for the past decade. That moment would have worked in 2000, but nowadays, any kid on an American playground has heard of the Avengers. via /r/movies http://bit.ly/2CYE1nJ