Early in “Glass,” an enjoyable new whatsit from M. Night Shyamalan, Samuel L. Jackson keeps winking at the camera. It’s a character tic, but it’s nice to think that Jackson is signaling that he’s hip to the absurdity. He plays Elijah Price, a.k.a. Mr. Glass, one of those dastardly masterminds with a tragic past and psychotic ambitions who in another era would be twirling a mustache. This being the Age of Comic Books, he instead can be seen furiously hacking a security system of a mental institution with nitwit guards, color-coordinated art direction and a couple of world-class adversaries in neighboring cells.
Glass’s villainy was first related in Shyamalan’s film “Unbreakable”(2000) an agreeably bonkers fantasy that also introduced his Everyman nemesis, David Dunn (Bruce Willis), who discovers his modest powers in middle age. (He can bench press serious weight.) When “Unbreakable” is good, it’s very good; when it’s bad, your eyes roll like roulette wheels. It’s a bit nuts and too often belabored — Shyamalan is burdened by the auteurist need to seem original. But he has skills. Few horror movies get under your skin as easily as “Unbreakable” does when a killer materializes at a family’s door (“I like your house”) a scene that creates the kind of terror that fires up your fight-or-flight response.
Shyamalan’s talent for primitive scares remains intact in “Glass,” as does his love for cramming a whole lot of story in one feature. A superhero thriller spiked with horror and family melodrama, the movie reunites its title evildoer with Dunn and brings them face to face with Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), the multiple-personality antihero of Shyamalan’s. Like his filmmaker-creator, Crumb can be awfully good or not. Much depends on which personality — the 9-year-old Hedwig, the bossy Patricia, the naughty Dennis — has taken hold, and whether Shyamalan is after laughs or shudders, both of which he routinely coaxes out in “Glass” until he doesn’t.
“Glass” opens smoothly with some small-scale heroics that set the humorous, twitchy tone and showcases Dunn, who’s still fighting while wearing an identity-obscuring rain poncho. The off-the-rack costume is crucial to his low-key charm and vibe. It’s also representative of Shyamalan’s eccentric, intimately scaled superhero universe, one that leans on quirks of personality and quotidian fears rather than on computer-generated special effects and world-destroying brawls. His heroes and villains are invariably more ordinary — and human — than extraordinary, which raises the stakes and amplifies the tension. Shyamalan finds a way to cram Dunn, Glass and Crumb into the same fictional universe, but he hasn’t found a persuasive way to make them fit together. He seems to know that, and so, after the reintroductions and other throat-clearing preliminaries, Shyamalan just locks all three in the same mental hospital. There, they are tended by a spectacularly inept shrink, Dr. Staple (Sarah Paulson), who insists that they are merely delusional. The actor Luke Kirby, who’s currently playing Lenny Bruce on the Amazon show “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” pops up as a hospital attendant, casting that I turned into an imaginary franchise crossover whenever “Glass” started to sag.
