So does Shyamalan bust open the superhero mythology? Can we ever see caped crusaders in the same way again? Does Glass have anything useful to add to the global conversation whatsoever? Respectively: no, yes, and kind of, eventually.
"Who painted this room, Stevie Wonder?"
And so we're off into a whirlwind of adventure, as these two freaks of nature are pitted against each other in a tense battle of strength and wits that will - oh no wait sorry hang on, silly me, I was thinking of something fun. What I meant to say is that Dunn and Crumb spend the best part of an hour locked in their cells having long, boring chats with Dr Staple about whether or not their powers are genuinely "super" or just exaggerated everyday skills. Dunn's original nemesis, Mr Glass, is conveniently locked up in the same hospital, but in a typically Shyamalanesque twist the director has hired the effervescent Samuel L Jackson and then told him to sit motionless and silent for an eternity.
"You mean I don't even get to say 'muthafucka', muthafucka?"
At one point Shyamalan seems to realise that as he's spent millions of dollars and several years getting these three actors in the same film, maybe he should get them in the same scene, so sets another tedious blah-fest in a large, inexplicably pink room where they sit next to each other but don't interact at all. It's all so dull that you start to pick holes in the film, like how Dr Staple was able to whisk two dangerous individuals off to a psychiatric hospital just like that, or why that hospital only employs one nurse at a time and a handful of guards who are the dictionary definition of useless, or why - with all this talk of superheroes being fictional - nobody ever says how much they're looking forward to Avengers: Endgame. In fairness, some of this is arguably explained in the film's climax. Explained, perhaps, but not excused: if you're going to have a big reveal, it helps if the audience have been invested in the mystery all along (cf The Sixth Sense), rather than alienated to the point of contemplating how long it is till Captain Marvel comes out.
"Seven weeks? SEVEN WEEKS?!"
Kudos to Shyamalan for pushing the real-worldliness of his superhero trilogy, but it's unlikely to find its place as a key text in the annals of the genre. Unbreakable took a hundred minutes to get going and then promptly ended, Split boasted a magnificent central performance and little else, and Glass is a weak and ultimately misguided attempt to tie the two together. It's still better than anything DC have curled out in the last five years, but you'll have a better, cheaper time if you just stay at home and stick the Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer on again.
