Critics reviews

By primarily defining Glass in formal, thematic, and ethical opposition to the adaptations he believes have been widely mistaken for the pinnacle of comic book form, Shyamalan here is unable to loosely interpret and interpolate the genre as he did in Unbreakable.

Despite its longueurs, Glass offers something we never see in contemporary tentpole comic-book movies: a stylized, color-coded, largely visual world, a reality of angles and camera moves.

What’s most notable about the film’s aesthetic is its texturelessness, the sense that the physical action is stilled and smoothed in a clear-blue gel of uniformity and indifference; it suggests a filmmaker on the outside looking in, and looking toward the next sequel.

Glass is no worse than Shyamalan’s other scams, particularly Split, which mimicked Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs but without comparable compassion or social alarm. Split was simply trite, but in Glass, Shyamalan ups the exploitative ante — adding social collapse to serial-killer-threat and girl-victim dread.

Extreme contrivance apart, there’s a distinct pleasure in the simplicity and modesty of Shyamalan’s undertaking. He’s a very clean, no-frills filmmaker, perhaps not paring down his style as much as, say, David Cronenberg, yet fairly ascetic in his flashiness.

For the most part, there is enough in the movie — creeping cameras, off-kilter boos, eye-popping mauve and especially its three male leads — to offset the longueurs, obvious filler and rickety plotting. . . . He’s still playing with genre but not nearly enough, and no amount of self-reflexive winking and meta-patter about comics makes it better.

In the end, Glass proves to be another of Shyamalan’s pompous sermons about faith in oneself, aimed at an audience from whom he cringingly craves fealty.

Shyamalan’s deep thoughts this time around are supposedly a continuation of those he posited in Unbreakable: that comic books are mankind’s way of passing deep historical truths down through the ages. But the mythology he tries to build in Glass is rushed and sloppy; the surprise twist at the end is really just more of a damp wrinkle.