Glass

M. Night Shaymalan is a divisive figure – his early successes were basically pulp subjects played seriously (sometimes overly so), and … well, he’s still delivering pulp, it’s just that the seriousness seems to have been turned down a tad. This one is a crossover of two of his previous films in what might be called “Unbreakable versus Split”, as the reluctant hero David Dunn (Bruce Willis) from the first fights the villainously multipersonalitied James McAvoy from the second. It’s very definitely a low-mid range budget of the story, and both get captured for treatment in a mental hospital run by Sarah Paulson which examines people who believe they have superhuman powers, spending much of the middle of the film either in conversation with one another or with Paulson, or with the third part of the triangle, Samuel L. Jackson’s brittle-boned genius. But of course there are plans within plans and circles within circles, and a couple of surprises will show up before the end…

Not all of these surprises are going to go down well with everybody – there’s a very definite attempt to tease what the big-budget superhero version of the third act could be before the film instead settles on something far more affordable, and this isn’t necessarily going a place everybody wants to go. And yes, Shaymalan’s not always the one to let a point land subtly when he can hit it heavily with a sledgehammer. But for all that, he tells an interesting tale and, while the film deliberately keeps Samuel L. Jackson muted and low-key for much of the length, when he emerges with full power it’s something to behold. Perhaps it’s also a little in love with McAvoy’s multiple-personality acting (there’s a couple of scenes in the middle which basically exist just to showcase him rather than to progress the plot), but I found this an enjoyable dark-edged pulpy story.