*Spoilers for Unbreakable and Split

After the ending of Split revealed that it was in the same universe as Unbreakable, M. Night Shyamalan went on to make this film, to close off this now trilogy. Glass takes place after the events of Split, and thus, nineteen years after the events of Unbreakable. It follows David Dunn, now obviously aged, with his son, trying to track down James McAvoy’s character after the crimes he committed in Split. However, he, as well as James McAvoy’s character, is caught and put into a mental asylum, where Elijah Prince from the first movie, better known as Mr. Glass, is also at. Throughout the film, they are tested by a psychiatrist who tries to convince all three of our main characters that they are not, in fact, superhuman.

And overall, I really liked the story of Glass. I think it was a unique and clever concept to choose to sort of close out this trilogy, and I found myself extremely engaged with most of the film. I liked how it was more of a mystery, just a little bit, where we have obviously seen the superhuman abilities of these individuals in Unbreakable and Split, but the psychiatrist, Doctor Ellie Staple, puts just enough of an element of questioning to cause uncertainty for both the characters and the audience on whether or not they are actually delusional. The majority of the film takes place inside the mental asylum, which sounds like it would be really slow, but I honestly thought it was excellently paced, with new details being revealed every now and again that kept me interested in what was going to happen next.

I was a huge fan of where David Dunn was as a character, starting from the beginning as well. I was somewhat expecting a cliché sort of “broken and grumpy old man,” as we see in a lot of legacy sequels nowadays (examples include Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker), and I was pleasantly surprised that wasn’t the case at all. He’s still the same David that we know and love from the original film, and has fully taken on the mantle of being a hero. What I also loved about this was that his son actually had a role to bring to the film too, where he is kind of the sidekick, or really the “guy in the chair” so to speak, that is behind the computer and helps his father navigate and all that.

In my review of Split, I mentioned that I didn’t really like James McAvoy’s character despite how great a performance he brought, simply because I found him overly strange and inaccurate to what his disorder actually does to people in real life. I also didn’t find the scarier parts of his character to be scary at all. In Glass, though, I found it to be the exact opposite. He still very much doesn’t portray DID in an accurate manner (which I don’t think was the intention anyway), but as an antagonist, I found him far scarier here. James McAvoy, of course, continued to deliver with his performance. Hedwig still cracks me up, etc.

I have to say, the character I was most curious about in terms of how he was going to be handled in this finale was Mr. Glass. I wasn’t really sure how he was going to fit into the story, because he had a good resolve anyway in Unbreakable. However, I do think that what was added to his character in Glass was both impactful and meaningful, and didn’t feel like it was forced just to have him in there. Shyamalan adds a little more empathy to his character through the use of both flashbacks and how he is treated in the mental asylum, and for at least a while, I kind of liked the guy. All the stuff with his mother was pretty compelling, too, even though I think it could have been even more prominent. Overall, though, the thing I not only liked but loved about his character here was all the “mastermind” stuff, which you’ll know what I’m talking about if you’ve seen Glass, but I don’t want to go into any detail so as not to give anything away.

The connection between Unbreakable and Split definitely felt a little bit forced, but Glass makes it not feel that way, thankfully. I was a big fan of how things tied into each other, and a lot of things that were revealed in the story pleasantly surprised me. All of the tie-ins added even more character depth to all three of the main characters, and they made the trilogy feel more complete overall. This, unfortunately, is another thing I don’t really want to go into too much detail, though, because I could see myself easily giving something away by accident.

Moving on to my next section, I’ll talk about one thing that didn’t personally bother me, but I could easily see frustrating others, and that is the character of Doctor Ellie Staple, the psychiatrist. She definitely makes some questionable decisions throughout the film, and treats characters in such a way that it definitely verges on the point of being a bit annoying, but as I said, it didn’t personally bother me because of the element of mystery and uncertainty that she brought. I think, whether you like her or not, she was pivotal to making the overall story interesting.

For my negatives, I have three, but two of them kind of coincide with one another, so I’ll talk about the standalone one first. Even though Glass does a really good job overall of making this trilogy not feel forced, the one element that did feel a bit forced was the inclusion of the character, Casey. She had a nice character resolution in Split, and not much was added to her here to make her any more interesting. Adding even more onto that, she feels almost like a completely different character than she did in Split. She doesn’t seem to have been very traumatized by what happened to her, which on its own is odd, but what is even more odd is how she handles that trauma, specifically with how she interacts with McAvoy’s character.

My two negatives that kind of go with one another are my big ones, and they have to do with the third act as a whole. The first one is that the big climax is just not satisfying on a dramatic level at all. It seems like it’s going to go in one big and bold direction, which I was extremely excited to see, but it ends up not being that whatsoever. To put it bluntly, it’s simply just too anticlimactic for what it seemed to be building to.

What I absolutely disliked the most, which quite honestly changed my entire perception of the film, was how it handled the resolutions to the character arcs of our main trio. Unsatisfying is not even a word to describe it, and it might honestly be one of the biggest drop-offs I’ve ever seen in a movie. Hate is a strong word, but what they do with David Dunn by the end was just the complete wrong decision to me, and while it doesn’t affect my opinions on Unbreakable at all, it does kind of ruin the trilogy. I wasn’t a fan of Split, but was a huge fan of Glass up until the very end, where my opinion kind of completely changed.

Glass was so close to being a great end to the trilogy.