Glass

Year 11, Day 303 - 10/30/19 - Movie #3,391

BEFORE: James McAvoy carries over from "Dark Phoenix". Obviously there were other tie-ins to be made here, like "It: Chapter Two", but I wisely decided that didn't fit in with my plans this year after all.  "It" would have required a trip to the theater, and between New York Comic Con and our vacation, I just didn't have the time for that.  So I'm going to drop "It" like it's hot, perhaps an Academy screener will arrive and I can include it next year.  Also, this film could have linked to either "The Witch" or "New Mutants" via Anya Taylor-Joy, but since "New Mutants" is apparently still on hold at Fox thanks to the Disney take-over, that's another film that's getting bumped to 2020 (assuming it ever does get released) so I might as well delay "The Witch" also to keep a linking possibility alive.

Instead, it's one more film tomorrow for Halloween, and then October is over.  And then before long I'll be doing my year-end wrap-up, and then I'll have to find slots in 2020 for all of those films that I've passed on.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Split" (Movie #2,826)

THE PLOT: Security guard David Dunn uses his supernatural abilities to track down Kevin Wendell Crumb, a disturbed man who has twenty-four personalities.

AFTER: I watched "Split" a year and a half ago, and the thing they didn't announce was that it was a semi-sequel to "Unbreakable", and they teased you just enough at the end that you'd want to come back for the next film to see how both storylines from the two films would tie together in a third film. People are learning that they have to stay in the theater until the very end, and sometimes even beyond that, if they want to get the full effect from certain franchises.  So is M. Night Shyamalan trying to parody the Marvel universe, or is he trying to ride the wave of the Marvelization of cinema?  It's a little tough to tell...

Of course since this was directed by M. Night Shyamalan, it's part of the M. Night-iverse, therefore you might expect it to tie several of his other films together.  And when you think of his previous movies, keeping in mind the type of movie he likes to make, you sort of half-expect the big twist ending, the one that somehow tells you that everything you know about what you just saw is also somehow completely wrong. (Think "The Sixth Sense" or "The Village")  He's basically created a world without superheroes that somehow has a couple of super-powered people in it.  So, does the world have superheroes in it or not?  Well, yes - and also no.  These would appear to be the only three people with powers.

But then the question gets raised - do they, in fact, have powers, or have they just been led to believe that they do?  Are they in fact just regular people who are either very disturbed, or delusional about their own abilities?  That's the main question that gets explored here.  Certainly there's a doctor who believes that the three men are delusional, and she's got a staff working for her, and an institute with rooms with padded walls and everything - so maybe?  Then, of course, they place the violent superhero, the criminal mastermind and the killer with a collection of deranged personalities into the same therapy session - what could POSSIBLY go WRONG?

The connections are all there - besides the fact that all of these men are from the greater Philadelphia area.  (So, is it something in the water in Philly that gives people super-powers?  It's unclear.)  We already know that Elijah, aka Mr. Glass, caused a train crash and there was only one survivor, David Dunn, who apparently is impervious to injury.  It's been a long time since I saw "Unbreakable", so I don't remember if Mr. Glass knew that this would happen, or if he was just committing a random act of evil, or if this was also unclear.  But it turns out that there's ANOTHER connection between Mr. Glass and Kevin Crumb (aka The Horde, aka The Beast, aka Patricia, Barry, Dennis, Hedwig, etc.) which I won't reveal here. But it's there.

And then everything sort of comes full circle when David Dunn decides to track down The Horde, because he's also got this innate ability somehow to touch people and have visions of their crimes, which seems just a little bit too convenient perhaps.  So he puts on a green poncho and turns up when people are in danger, and saves them with his super-strength (which again, he either may or may not really have) until people start calling him "The Overseer" in the news.  Meanwhile, Elijah aka Mr. Glass is in the Institute for the Randomly Delusional or Possibly Super-Powered (that sign must have set them back a pretty penny...) and he's completely catatonic.  Or, is he?  His wheelchair keeps turning up in different rooms and nobody's quite sure how he got there.  He couldn't be faking, right? RIGHT?  (Geez, when people start stealing plot points from "Dumb and Dumber To", we're all in some kind of trouble...)

There's another thing that's borrowed from the comics here, the implication that the existence of super-villains might be caused by the existence of super-heroes, or perhaps it's the other way around. I've heard it said many times that if there were no Batman, there wouldn't be a Joker (or a Riddler, or a Penguin...) but is that TRUE?  It's unclear - I haven't seen the latest "Joker" movie which apparently has a new take on his origin, but I think from what I've heard, in that film, the Joker came FIRST and his existence was not a reaction to the appearance of Batman.  (It's still unclear how in the DC universe there can be THREE Jokers, they still haven't answered this question.  Unless they're talking about the Pre-Crisis Joker, the post-Flashpoint Joker and the post-Rebirth Joker - but they haven't clarified yet.)

It all seems like it's leading to a very comic-book like battle in a very comic-book like setting - but then it just...sort of doesn't.  Was this a choice that was made in the name of telling the best possible story, defying our expectations, or was this a choice that was made to help keep the movie's budget down?  This, also, is unclear.  It turns out there's a fine line between "defying the audience's expectations" and "setting up the audience for a big climax, and then letting everyone down".  I'm not prepared to make this call, you'll have to watch the film and judge for yourself.

Something I learned during the production of an animated feature that's currently in progress - according to Screen Actors Guild rules, if an actor plays more than one character during a shoot day, they get paid extra.  I remember back in 2004 when we were recording dialogue for the film "Hair High", which was a SAG production, we'd ask the cast to read random lines of dialogue, as "Student #2" or "Spectator #3" and nobody had a problem with it.  But I guess now, even if it's there's one line of dialogue performed as a different character, that actor gets paid double.  Which leads me to wonder about James McAvoy playing a person with 20 different personalities - did he get paid extra for switching back and forth between them?  From a legal and/or accounting standpoint, does The Horde count as one character, or twenty?

The biggest NITPICK POINT I can muster up here is - why is there even any debate over these three men, regarding whether they have powers or not?  Either way, if they have powers or don't have powers, it seems like that should be relatively easy to determine, thus there should be no confusion.  If they have them, they have them - easy to prove.  And if they don't have them, then they can't do certain things that they think they can - again, very easy to prove.  So wherein lies the confusion?  In order to create some dramatic tension, it seems like things had to be made much, much complicated than they should have been.

But as I always say, your mileage may vary.  I get the same feeling that I got from "Dark Phoenix", which is that this film could have been much better, but then again, I think I rate superhero films on a sliding scale.  So a "bad" superhero film could easily get a higher score than a 'just-OK" non-superhero film.  That's just how my scoring system works.   Extra point for getting back all of the key players from TWO other films made by different studios, and not having to re-cast any of those roles.

Also starring Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "Spider-Man: Far From Home"), Bruce Willis (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Sarah Paulson (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Anya Taylor-Joy (last seen in "Split"), Spencer Treat Clark (last seen in "Arlington Road"), Charlayne Woodard (last seen in "He Said, She Said"), Adam David Thompson (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)"), Luke Kirby (last seen in "Take This Waltz"), Rosemary Howard (last seen in "The End of the Tour"), Bryan McElroy, Johnny Hiram Jamison, Owen Vitullo, with a cameo from M. Night Shyamalan (also last seen in "Split").

RATING: 6 out of 10 security cameras