Picoreview: Glass

Picoreview: Glass: This is definitely the kind of movie M. Night Shyamalan would make to wrap up his Unbreakable trilogy, and not the kind of movie I would make. :)

I liked it better than I expected to, really. I didn’t see Split, which looked too horror-ish for me, and also because of the political aspect of how badly disassociative identity disorder is portrayed in it. That said, I mean…they’re comic book movies, so if we pretend it’s not intended to be a real-world portrayal of DID and that rather, there’s some kind of comic book thing which causes people to occasionally break out in mulitiple personalities, then we can just accept that James McAvoy is in fact very good at all of his different personalities. It only took me a couple minutes to be able to tell, just from his body language, who he’d switched to, which is pretty great acting.

Samuel L. Jackson was both underutilized and key, which is a somewhat weird combination. There’s a great moment that appears to be full of compassion that I thought was just magnificent, in wonderful manipulative keeping with the character. Meanwhile, Bruce Willis was Bruce Willis. Honestly, the bit I liked most about him was that the same actor as played his son in Unbreakable was his son again in this film, which doesn’t often seem to happen (I’m still angry for you, kid-who-played-Jack-in-Pitch Black-but-didn’t-get-to-reprise-the-role-in-Chronicles of Riddick!). :)

Shyamalan’s gotten into this position where he’s expected to have A Twist at the end of his films. There were a couple of good reveals, one of which met and then exceeded my expectation, and the other of which was possibly twisty enough to be a proper twist, but I considered it more of a reveal than A Twist. I liked it, though, and it fed into the whole story structure very well.

Overall, for me it was a…a not-quite-satisfying conclusion to the trilogy. It was…yeah. I just wouldn’t have done what he did, so it’s artistic differences, but I do think what he *did*, works within his universe. So. There you go. :)

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