Is it possible to lock up Worst Movie of the Year in January?
Genre: ?
Premise: (from IMDB) Security guard David Dunn uses his supernatural abilities to track Kevin Wendell Crumb, a disturbed man who has twenty-four personalities.
About: In 2003, M. Night Shyamalan followed up his breakout film, The Sixth Sense, with Unbreakable, a film with a twist so bizarre, audiences left confused as to whether Night was a genius or a hack. Night made no secret about how much he wanted to make a sequel to Unbreakable, and last year, he finally got his shot when his film “Split” unexpectedly became a hit. Night decided to leverage this newfound audience love by merging the Split universe with the Unbreakable one. The resulting film, “Glass,” became one of the hottest projects in town. It debuted this weekend, making 40.5 million dollars over the 3-day weekend (most sites are tacking on an extra day of receipts for the holiday, which would put it at 45 million). Whether this was a successful haul or not depends on how you frame it. Early tracking had this film doing 75+ million. However, a sub-40% Rotten Tomatoes score killed a lot of the film’s buzz, robbing the film of millions. However you look at it, Night is back, for better or worse.
Writer: M. Night Shyamalan
Details: 130 minutes
When I heard people were looking forward to this movie, my first thought was, do you have early onset insanity? We are talking about M. Night here, a man who has made some of the worst movies this side of 2000. And I loved M. Night after The Sixth Sense. I was a Night disciple. But the second I finished Unbreakable, my opinion of him flipped. That was one of the most boring movies I’ve ever seen.
So to say I was jonezing to see Glass would be false. But Night is the master of train wreck theater (no pun intended). When he’s bad, he’s so bad you can’t look away. His movies are often inadvertent lessons in how not to write a screenplay. And for that reason, I was willing to pay 20 bucks for the latest chapter in the Night Tragedy.
Glass introduces us to David Dunn years after the events of Unbreakable. He runs a security company with his now grown-up son, and in his spare time, sneaks out, using his super power of rubbing up against people to see if they’re a bad person, and the if they are, beating them up using his other super power, 10% higher than normal strength.
So one day, David is walking around and rubs up against Split’s Kevin Crumb (McAvoy), who he realizes is holding four new girls hostage. David calls his son, who helps him find the building the girls are being held in, goes and releases them, only to run into Kevin’s “super hero” personality, “The Beast.” David and The Beast fight (if you call three minutes of one person holding another person up against a column a fight), only to be caught by the police and sent to a 50,000 square foot psyche ward operated by 3 people.
At the ward, a woman named Dr. Ellie Staple informs David, Kevin, and Mr. Glass (who’s already a long time patient at the ward) that she specializes in helping people who believe that they are superheroes overcome their delusion (no, I’m not making that up). The next 90 hours of the movie is dedicated to hanging out with the captured patients, while Dr. Staple periodically studies them.
Finally, Mr. Glass breaks out of his room and informs both Kevin and David that they’re going to have a superhero fight (no, I’m not making that up) which will be taped by the hospital security cameras, then released to the world, in order to fulfill Mr. Glass’s lifetime mission – to prove to the world that superheroes are real (no, I’m not making that up either). What follows is one of the lamest movie fights ever, after which we learn that (spoiler) Dr. Staple is part of a secret organization that can only meet in downtown restaurants. Their goal is to find real superheroes and convince them that they’re not superheroes. The End.
One of the most frustrating things about Night is that it’s clear he doesn’t get any notes on his scripts. If he did, so many of the stupid choices he makes could be avoided. Take for instance this secret organization. They only meet at public restaurants and only speak once everyone who’s not a member of the organization finishes their dinner and leaves. How inefficient do you have to be as an organization that your meetings are dictated by waiting for people to finish their meal? JUST MEET IN THE FREAKING BASEMENT!!!
I’m willing to bet my pinky that Night didn’t get a single note on this script from anyone other than a family member. Even the most causal movie fan would’ve been able to point out how stupid some of these choices were.
I mean we’re not even 10 minutes into the movie when one of these moments occurs. David brushes up against Kevin in a deserted industrial part of Philadelphia. He senses Kevin’s kidnapped girls secret, seeing that they’re in some sort of industrial brick room. David then calls his son. “I found the guy who’s holding those girls,” he says. “They’re in some sort of brick room!” He waits until his son comes back with, “There’s a brick building south of you. Try there!” Cut to a wide shot of the location to show that literally EVERY SINGLE BUILDING IN A FIVE BLOCK RADIUS IS INDUSTRIAL AND BRICK. Which would’ve been a great joke, actually. But Night writes it so that David now knows exactly where to go. Stuff like this happens non-stop during the movie.
Night’s problem is that he’s the single most transparent screenwriter in the world. Nothing he writes has any truth to it. He will throw all logic out the window as long as he gets to write the scene he wants. What do I mean by this? Well, there’s a scene where two women are placed alone in a room with an un-cuffed psychopathic serial killer with superhuman strength. Why? Because Night wanted to write a scene where one of the women (the girl who escaped Kevin in Split) made a connection with him.
But if you ignore reality (no psyche ward would ever allow this to happen) to achieve that, all suspension of disbelief is destroyed. And Night does this all the time. This is why you have such a feeling of frustration whenever you watch a Night film. You don’t know why you hate it, only that you do. This is the main reason why. Because he ignores reality in order to write cute shit.
But this is just the beginning of how bad this film is. The movie doesn’t exist in any identifiable genre. It’s presented as a superhero movie, but it’s played as a drama, and then occasionally, spits in some horror and serial killer elements. No doubt Night would argue that is what makes his movie so unique. But that’s not how it works. If we’re not sure what kind of movie we’re watching, we grow irritated and confused. It’s been a few hours since this movie ended and I still couldn’t tell you what the genre is.
Then there’s the protagonist problem. Who’s the protagonist in this movie? It starts out being David Dunn. Then it moves over to Kevin. Then it’s Dr. Ellie Staple. Then it’s David’s son. Then it’s the escaped girl from Split. And, finally, it’s Mr. Glass. At one point or another, each of these characters is pushing the narrative. Do you know how confusing that is to the audience? If we don’t know who the main character is, we don’t know where to place or allegiance. Even worse, we don’t know what the point of the movie is. Which is, arguably, Glass’s biggest issue. The TRUE point of the movie, which is Mr. Glass’s master plan to have the superheroes fight, doesn’t arrive until an hour and forty minutes into the movie! So what the eff were we doing up until that point? Outside of a single scene where Dr. Staple is attempting to convince our trio that they’re not superheroes, I don’t know what we were doing.
No doubt part of this issue is because this is a Blumhouse film, which means they didn’t have a lot of money. That’s likely why the entire second act took place in four rooms. But that doesn’t get you off the hook. Part of your job as a screenwriter is to figure out how to keep the engine running during that time. If you can’t even get the basics down – having a clear genre and a clear protagonist – how do you expect to navigate the hardest portion of the script – the second act??
And to top it all off, M. Night is a terrible director. He directs in a style that is, at best, pretentious and, at worst, annoying. Every scene is shot in a way where you can never quite see everything. For example, he’ll shoot an entire scene where the main character’s face is in shadow. Or, if there’s a fight, he’ll have another character in the foreground, blocking most of the fight. Or, he’ll shoot from behind someone the whole scene. In his mind, he’s creating art. In reality, a place where Night has yet to visit, it’s incredibly frustrating. JUST SHOW US WHAT’S HAPPENING! It’s not hard.
Finally, let’s talk about this climactic fight. Can someone explain it to me? Glass’s plan was to upload this footage to the world to prove that superheroes were real, right? Afterwards, we see people receiving the video on their phones and being amazed. Did they see the same fight I did?? Cause absolutely nothing impossible happened in that fight. Everything could be explained naturally. There is stuff like this out there right now, which is 100 times more amazing than anything in the Glass fight. It’s just one more example of how miscalculated Night is.
Needless to say, I wasn’t a fan of Glass. And to take it one step further, I don’t know how this man is working. His movies are awful.
[x] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the main reasons second acts die is because they don’t have a strong narrative engine underneath – namely, a character who’s going after something important with some level of urgency. One of the big reasons Glass fails is that it disperses the second act engine to five different characters. It takes us too long to figure out what the true narrative engine is – Dr. Ellie Staple trying to convince these patients that they’re not superheroes. And even when that becomes clear, it doesn’t feel a) important or b) urgent. And this is why the second act of Glass is so slow.
