Samuel L. Jackson’s Elijah Price, or Mr. Glass, as he prefers to be called, was by far the most compelling part of M. Night Shyamalan’s slow-burn comic book send-up “Unbreakable.” A brilliant, tortured manipulator and superhero enthusiast suffering from osteogenesis imperfecta (i.e. brittle bone disease), Glass is that kind of charismatic supervillain that you can’t get enough of.
Nineteen years is certainly a long time to wait for more Mr. Glass. But Shyamalan, even after naming this long-gestating film after Jackson’s character, decides to withhold him from the audience even longer. Yes, he makes Mr. Glass a highly sedated vegetable who gets to do little more thank blink and intensely stare at the camera for what feels like more than half of the movie.
It’s one of the many ways in which “Glass ,” which seems to delight in building up anticipation only to pull the rug out from under you, manages to both frustrate and underwhelm. I’m sure it’s some kind of meta-commentary on the futility of serialized storytelling, the contrivances and deification of comic book culture and easily malleable audience expectations, but in execution it mostly feels like a tub full of half-baked ideas that never really coalesce into something exciting, meaningful or all that memorable.
“Glass” definitely doesn’t care to help if you haven’t seen “Unbreakable” or “Split,” either. It just dives right in with little exposition. We see Bruce Willis’s David Dunn taking a couple of teen pranksters to task. Then it jumps to James McAvoy’s multiple personalities, who’ve decided to take four teenage cheerleaders hostage because they’re “impure” and “need to be punished.”