Glass (2019)

Just because we’re crazy doesn’t mean we’re wrong.

(2019) Superhero (Blumhouse/Universal) James McAvoy, Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sarah Paulson, Spencer Treat Clark, Charlayne Woodard, Luke Kirby, Adam David Thompson, M. Night Shyamalan, Shannon Ryan, Diana Silvers, Nina Wisner, Kyli Zion, Serge Didenko, Russell Porter, Kimberly Fairbanks, Rosemary Howard, Leslie Stefanson. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan

 

Glass is the conclusion of a trilogy that began almost 20 years earlier with Unbreakable and then continued in a stealth sort of way in his 2016 film Split. It is director M. Night Shyamalan’s take on the superhero mythos and America’s obsession with it.

It features three characters from those first two movies; heroic David Dunn (Willis), virtually invulnerable and known in the press as the Overseer; Kevin Crumb (McAvoy), possessed of multiple personalities including a super-powered one known as the Beast, and Mr. Glass (Jackson), a criminal mastermind with impossibly brittle bones.

As Dunn chases Crumb, who has kidnapped several cheerleaders and is holding them hostage to feed to the Beast, eventually both of them are captured by the police and sent to an asylum where a psychiatrist (Paulson) tries to convince the three of them that they have no superpowers. Of course, we know that they do and it sets up a coda between the Overseer and the Beast that will lead to one of Shyamalan’s patented twist endings.

Shyamalan conspicuously avoids world-building here, preferring to set things in the real world with three extraordinary individuals. Each has someone who is a civilian counterpart; David’s son Joseph (Clark), Glass’ mom (Woodard) and Crumb’s escaped victim (Taylor-Joy). Shyamalan and cinematographer Mike Gioulakis use color-coding – purple for Glass, yellow/ocher for Crumb and green for Dunn. It gives the movie an almost comic-book feel that I found appealing.

While the soundtrack is wonderful and the performances by Jackson, Willis and particularly McAvoy marvelous, the movie is bogged down by Shyamalan’s attempts to make his film mythic but when push comes to shove, it comes off more pretentious and long-winded than what I think he intended. I had high hopes for this film, especially since Split had been one of Shyamalan’s best films, but was ultimately disappointed in that the movie was merely okay.

REASONS TO SEE: Willis, Jackson and McAvoy are all strong.
REASONS TO AVOID: Tries very hard to be mythic but doesn’t quite get there.
FAMILY VALUES: There is violence and gore, some adult thematic elements and regular profanity.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: In order to retain creative control on the film, Shyamalan mortgaged his own house to co-finance it.
BEYOND THE THEATERS: Amazon, AMC On Demand, AppleTV, Fandango Now, Google Plus, HBO Now, Microsoft, Movies Anywhere, Redbox, Vudu, YouTube
CRITICAL MASS: As of 5/31/20: Rotten Tomatoes: 37% positive reviews, Metacritic: 43/100
COMPARISON SHOPPING: X-Men Origins: Wolverine
FINAL RATING: 6/10
NEXT: IO

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New Releases for the Week of January 18, 2019

GLASS

(Blumhouse/Universal) Samuel L Jackson, Bruce Willis, James McAvoy, Sarah Paulson, Anya Taylor-Joy, Spencer Treat Clark, Luke Kirby. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan

Three men have been committed to a mental institution because they think they have super powers. A dedicated shrink thinks she can cure these men of their delusions but when it turns out that they really do have super powers and that one of them is an evil mastermind who wants to see a whole lot of people get killed, the party gets real.

See the trailer, clips, interviews, video featurettes and B-roll video here
For more on the movie this is the website
Release Formats: Standard, 4DX, DBOX, Dolby, IMAX, RPX, XD
Genre: Superhero
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: PG-13 (for violence including some bloody images, thematic elements, and language)

Burning

(Well Go USA) Ah-in Yoo, Steven Yeun, Jong-seo Jun, Soo-kyung Kim. Two former neighbors bump into each other quite accidentally while one is making a delivery. The woman asks the delivery man to watch her cat while she’s on a trip to Africa. When she returns, she introduces him to a man she’s met who turns out to have some interesting hobbies.

See the trailer here
For more on the movie this is the website
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Drama
Now Playing: Enzian Theater
Rating: PG (for thematic elements, some peril and language)

Canal Street

(Smith Global Media) Bryshere Y. Gray, Mykelti Williamson, Mekhi Phifer, Lance Reddick. A father and son on Chicago’s South Side are facing long odds when the teen is accused of murdering a white classmate. The fight will bring the two closer together through their faith in God.

See the trailer here
For more on the movie this is the website
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Drama
Now Playing: Regal The Loop, Regal Waterford Lakes
Rating: PG-13 (for thematic elements including some bloody images, drug use and teen partying)

ALSO OPENING IN ORLANDO/DAYTONA:

All These Small Moments
Buffalo Boys
Aurora
Dragon Ball Super: Broly
Parkland: Inside Building 12
Shoplifters

ALSO OPENING IN MIAMI/FT. LAUDERDALE:

Cold War
Dragon Ball Super: Broly
The Heiresses
The Standoff at Sparrow Creek

ALSO OPENING IN TAMPA/ST. PETERSBURG:

The Brawler
Dragon Ball Super: Broly
Ente Ummante Peru
The Last Man
The Standoff at Sparrow Creek

ALSO OPENING IN JACKSONVILLE/ST. AUGUSTINE:

Aurora
Dragon Ball Super: Broly

SCHEDULED FOR REVIEW:

Cold War
Glass

FILM FESTIVALS TAKING PLACE IN FLORIDA:

Saint Augustine Film Festival, St. Augustine

Pick of the Litter – January 2019

BLOCKBUSTER OF THE MONTH

Glass

(Blumhouse/Universal) Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy. Security guard David Dunn is locked up in an institution for his belief that he has superpowers. But when a disturbed patient with 24 separate personalities including a homicidal maniac escapes, Dunn must put his powers to the test – knowing all of this is masterminded by evil genius Mr. Glass. This is a sequel to M. Night Shyamalan’s previous films Unbreakable and Split.. January 18

INDEPENDENT PICKS

Genesis 2.0

(Kimstim) Christian Frei. Jeff Goldblum as the fictional chaos theory mathematician once said “They were so busy trying to see if they could they never stopped to think if they should.” That was from the original Jurassic Park. Life is imitating art at a much more rapid pace than you might be aware; the discovery of a nearly intact mammoth carcass in the Siberian permafrost with muscle, liquid blood and fur intact has set off a frenzy of scientific interest as geneticists and virologists look to research the find and possibly bring an ancient mammoth back to life from the DNA recently discovered.  January 2

The Vanishing

(Saban) Gerard Butler, Peter Mullan, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Gary Lewis. In 1900 three lighthouse keepers in the Flannan Isles in the Outer Hebrides off the coast of Scotland disappeared without a trace and were never seen again. Although much conjecture about their fates was considered by the newspapers of the time, no explanation for their disappearance has ever been fully accepted. This film looks at one possibility. January 4

Ashes in the Snow

(Vertical) Bel Powley, Peter Franzén, Sophie Cookson, James Cosmo. In his quest for power, Stalin and the Soviet Union occupied many countries already reeling from the ravages of the war. A 16-year-old aspiring artist and her family are deported from the Baltic to Siberia due to her father’s anti-Stalinist stance. Young Nina draws what she sees in hopes that history will give a voice to those who have none. January 11

Girl

(Netflix) Victor Polster, Arieh Worthalter, Oliver Bodart, Tijmen Govaerts. A 15-year-old girl, born in a boy’s body, dreams of becoming a ballerina even as she begins her body transition but achieving all her dreams may not be enough. This is up for the Best Foreign Language Film at the upcoming Golden Globe Awards. January 18

The Image Book

(Kino-Lorber) Jean-Luc Godard, Buster Keaton, Dmitri Basil. Without a doubt Jean-Luc Godard is one of the great visual artists of our lifetime. His latest film can only be described as a cinematic collage which may seem random at first but I’m told tells a story in five parts that illustrates his take on the state of humanity as the 2010s circle the drain. January 25

The Wild Pear Tree

(The Cinema Guild) Domu Demirkol, Murat Cemcir, Bennu Yildirimlar, Hazar Erguçlu. A young man returns home to his village from college with the intention of becoming a writer. However, his father’s debts put a crimp in his plans and thrust his family into peril. January 30

Moonraker

In space, nobody can hear your witticisms.

(1979) Sci-Fi Spy Action (United Artists) Roger Moore, Lois Chiles, Michael Lonsdale, Richard Kiel, Corinne Cléry, Bernard Lee, Geoffrey Keen, Desmond Llewellyn, Lois Maxwell, Toshiro Suga, Emily Bolton, Blanche Ravalec, Walter Gotell, Arthur Howard, Michael Marshall, Brian Keith, Chichinou Kaeppler, Claude Carliez, Catherine Serre, Beatrice Libert.  Directed by Lewis Gilbert

Among James Bond fans, Moonraker remains even today a divisive subject. Some hail it as being among the best of the entire franchise (New York Times critic Vincent Canby thought it was even better than Goldfinger) while others look upon it as campy schlock with little redeeming value.

The plot is pure balderdash. A space shuttle, on loan to Britain from the U.S., is hijacked from a 747 on the way back to America. James Bond (Moore), MI-6 agent 007 is assigned the case by M (Lee, his last appearance in the franchise) and is sent to interview Hugo Drax (Lonsdale), the billionaire owner of Drax Industries who manufactured the shuttle. While on the French estate which the industrialist had moved stone by stone to the California desert, Bond meets Dr. Holly Goodhead (Chiles), an astronaut assigned to Drax and is nearly murdered by Chang (Suga), Drax’ bodyguard. With the assistance of Corinne Dufour (Cléry), Drax’ personal pilot, Bond discovers some blueprints to an unusual glass container.

Bond goes to Venice to find out the secret of the container and discovers that it is a vessel for a highly toxic nerve gas, accidentally killing several lab technicians in the process. Chang, however, he kills on purpose. He calls in the cavalry only to find the entire operation has disappeared. However, Bond kept a vial of the gas as proof and M keeps Bond on the case despite calls to take him off it. Under the guise of sending Bond on holiday, M sends him to Rio de Janeiro where Bond has discovered that Drax has moved his operations. There, with helpful contact Manuela (Bolton) he eventually learns that Drax has a secret base near Iguazu Falls on the Amazon.

Drax also has a new bodyguard, by the name of Jaws (Kiel) and a plan – to render Earth uninhabitable by humankind (the gas is harmless to animals and plants) and take the most beautiful specimens of humans onto a space station orbiting the Earth, kept hidden by a massive radar jamming device. Bond and Goodhead, who  turns out to be an ally, must stop Drax from wiping out all of humanity and beginning a new master race, one which he and his descendants will rule.

As Bond movies go this one is pretty ambitious. It had for its time an eyebrow-raising budget. In fact, For Your Eyes Only was supposed to follow The Spy Who Loved Me but as Star Wars had rendered the moviegoing public sci-fi crazy, producer Albert Broccoli decided to capitalize on the craze and send Bond into space. Utilizing series regular Derek Meddings on special effects (for which he was nominated for an Oscar) and Ken Adam for set design, this became one of the more visually spectacular of the Bond films, right up there with the volcano lair of You Only Live Twice.

Moore as Bond relied on witticisms more than Sean Connery ever did; here he approaches self-parody. By this time he was beginning to show his age (he was older than Connery was when he made Never Say Never Again) and becoming less believable in the role, although he would go on to make three more Bond films. This wasn’t his finest moment as Bond but he continued to make it through on charm and comic timing.

His main Bond mate, Chiles, was decidedly less successful. Many consider her the coldest Bond girl ever; she is decidedly unconvincing as a scientist and less so as a spy. She has almost no chemistry with Moore; Carole Bouquet would turn out to be a much better fit for Moore in For Your Eyes Only which wisely brought Bond back to basics when it came out in 1981.

Kiel, as Jaws, was already one of the most popular Bond villains of all time. Rather than being menacing, he became almost comic relief; his indestructibility becomes a running joke which might have been a tactical mistake by the writers. The movie desperately needed a sense of peril to Bond and you never get a sense he’s in any real danger other than a single sequence when Chang attempts to murder him in a G-force testing machine. Nonetheless Kiel is game and is one of the better elements in the film.

By this point in the series Bond films essentially wrote themselves and had become a little bit formulaic. Despite the popularity of this film, Broccoli knew that he had to break the franchise out of its rut and he would do so with the following film which would become one of the best of the Moore era; this one, while some loved it and audiences flocked to it, remains less highly thought of today. It is still impressive for its space battle sequence, it’s amazing sets and zero gravity sequences, even despite being somewhat dated. It, like nearly every Bond film, is solid entertainment by any scale.

WHY RENT THIS: Special effects were nifty for their time. Moore remains the most witty of the Bonds. Jaws.
WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: Chilly Chiles. Lacks any sense of peril. Occasionally dull.
FAMILY VALUES: Violence and some sexual innuendo
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Would be the highest-grossing film of the series until Goldeneye broke the record in 1995.
NOTABLE HOME VIDEO EXTRAS: The Special Edition DVD includes a still gallery and a featurette on the Oscar-nominated special effects. The Blu-Ray edition includes these as well as some storyboards and test footage.
BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $210.3M on a $34M production budget.
SITES TO SEE: Netflix (Blu-Ray/DVD Rental only), Amazon, iTunes, Vudu (download only)
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
FINAL RATING: 6/10
NEXT: Sci-Fi Spectacle continues!