I say that it is not surprising because of the fact that I have pretty low expectations of M. Night Shlamahamalam. I think that he started out strong but for the most part is very "hit-and-miss" with his movies. I thought "Unbreakable" was "ok," I thought "Split" was excellent, I thought "Glass" was garbage.
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For starters, the movie is called "Glass" and one would assume that based on this that the film would focus primarily on Mr. Glass as a consequence. It doesn't. I believe that Sam Jackson actually has the least amount of the focus of the film out of the 3 people involved. For almost the entire film, dude is sitting in a wheelchair in a faked catatonic state and Sammy must have really enjoyed getting a massive paycheck for this particular script.
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Seriously. This is like 80% of his acting in the film
Instead, the film focuses almost entirely on James McAvoy's character that has 24 personalities - which is nice because I like the character and James' exquisite portrayal of it. However, we already saw that movie.... It was called "Split."
The story is half-baked to say the least and while it starts out quite exciting in the first 10 minutes or so, it then goes on to put us in a secret asylum, with all 3 of the "superheros" in separate cells captured by a group of people that we are told very little about.
Then the movie just drags on for about an hour.
This group who just happens upon the encounter between McAvoy and Willis at the start is responsible and I hate it when magical clandestine groups just simply "know" everything about the people in the movie that appear to be super-human. Why do you know about them? How did you know that they were both going to be at this place at the same time? Why, if you had this information, did you wait to intervene until this moment? How do you know about the weaknesses of both of this guys ( I mean, they know everything.)
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Then the 3 of them go through group therapy sessions together because that is what is exciting.... right?
It's just dumb. The 3 dudes are locked in this place and it is Mr. Glass who eventually figures out how to get them all out... a notion that is so telegraphed that they may as well just shown it to us. I mean, nobody watching this couldn't figure that out.
I wont ruin the twist ending, because I actually didn't see it coming but it is so convoluted and stupid that it has to be narrated to an extreme degree for the story to even make sense. Then when it does make sense you don't care.... because it is dumb.
I think this film had a lot of potential but what a turd it ended up being. I had just written a short while ago about how I quite enjoyed a more practical approach to super-herodom with people that are undoubtedly super-human, but not crazily overpowered (insert Captain Marvel or Superman here.)
That being said, i can't think of any way that they could have possibly made this film any worse. In interviews with M. Knight he said that he closed the films because he had no interest in building a "superhero universe" which i suppose is fair enough. For me, I would have preferred this movie had never been made than be made in the way that it was. The critics and general public seem to agree with me on this one. It did make 100+ million dollars globally though, so i guess their marketing campaign would be considered a success!
On a scale of "Urgh!" to "Wowsers!" I give Glass the overall score of
