First of all, disclosure time. I don't mind M Knight Shyamalan. I liked The Sixth Sense, saw in theaters without being spoiled. I liked Unbreakable and Signs a little more, did not like Lady in the Water or The Happening, found The Village underwhelming and liked The Visit. I also became quite exasperated at criticism and mockery of him based solely on the issue of twists, because aside from the first one, his films didn't really depend on the twists. 6S was a decent genre film for all of that twist being responsible for the buzz it got, and I think the twist effaced the memory of its slow pace for most of the general audience. When some more critically-beloved pretentious butthead who prefers to make statements rather than amuse his audience makes a slow movie, it is called "deliberate" (ahem, Cohen brothers). And I think that lets a lot of people down when they don't get some sort of instant gratification in his movies so they pin all their hopes on a surprise ending, which mostly do not live up to expectations. But Shyamalan's movies are generally very deliberate, building up the atmosphere, with a theme about the protagonist generally being right and needing to believe in himself. Signs might have been about the protagonist rediscovering his faith in God, but since he was a clergyman, that kind of comes back to vindicating his choice to embrace that vocation. And that's also kind of meta, since I recall talk that Shyamalan intended to make sequels to Unbreakable, which took him more than a dozen years to accomplish, because no one bought into his idea of multiple movies linked by Samuel L Jackson recruiting superheroes.

I think that's what people overlook when they go into these movies expecting something else, or finding the twist not to their liking and condeming the whole thing on that basis. Overall, I'd Shyamalan's movies aren't really my cup of tea but I usually don't mind his execution of them. And he's pretty good at mysteries, and should probably do more of those. He'd probably be really good at doing a noir detective film.

So anyway, on to Glass. This is the sequel to Unbreakable and the much more recent Split, in which the twist was that it coexisted in the same setting the former. Anyway, a real world amount of time has passed. David Dunn (Bruce Willis) operates a security store along with his now adult son, and has been engaging in crime fighting using his powers of strength, invincibility and reading guilty people by touch. Elijah Glass (Jackson) has been institutionalized and apparently catatonic, for his acts of large scale murder in his attempt to identify superhuman people. And the Horde (James McAvoy), whose disassociative identity disorder manifests in one persona of a predatory superhuman known as The Beast, is on the loose and has committed more murders, and most recently has kidnapped a group of girls for another round of sacrifice to The Beast. Anya Taylor-Joy returns as the Horde's near-victim, and Glass's mother & Dunn's son are there as well, all three of whom give an additional human dimension to the maybe-superhuman trio.

The ambiguity of their powers was a significant aspect of the prior films, but this one goes right to a confrontation between Dunn and the Horde, which is interrupted by the arrival of a police tactical unit on the scene, which arrests them and incarcerates them in a mental hospital along with Glass, under the supervision of a psychiatrist Dr Staple (Sarah Paulson), who is determined to cure the trio of their delusions about their superhuman powers. While they are locked in cells equipped to take advantage of their respective weaknesses, which is a strange precaution to take when you don't believe in superpowers. Like, if you think Superman is an ordinary, if delusional, human being, are you going to bother messing around with Kryptonite?

But you have to remember, it's an M. Knight Shyamalan movie. This is not a superhero action film. David Dunn is a character, not the hero, and Shyamalan never said he was, only our own expectations based on the Marvel movies. Mr Glass would have some things to say about that. This film is more about Glass as an antagonist or villain protagonist, sort of like Mody Dick in that he might not actually be out there, but his actions are what brought things to this point. And Dr Staple is the antagonist/protagonist counterpoint to him. I think a lot of people are coming into this expecting a story about a fight between Dunn & the Horde, but the conflict is really Staple vs Glass (or the deception/delusion he set up). And because it's a Shyamalan movie, you don't know everything. There are twists, yes. Two or three, depending on how you count them. One of them seems at first glance, sort of out of left field, until you realize that it explains something very significant, and puts a whole new meaning on an otherwise inexplicable issue. Another is the revelation of the true intentions of one character, and is less of a twist because we are actually shown the character serving those intentions, even if we don't know it at the time. And the third or so (technically the first one revealed) actually ties the three movies more closely together.

My point is, the movie is not cheating, but I can see this being very disappointing to people who are expecting a Kevin Feige film from M. Knight Shyamalan. I don't think it fails to deliver, even if I would have preferred it deliver something else. This series started out in a time when Shyamalan felt the need to start Unbreakable with a title card giving stats on the scope of comic book popularity. This was 8 years before Iron Man & Incredible Hulk started the MCU, it was two years before the first Spider-man movie, 3 years before Daredevil or the first Hulk movie, and it came out the same year as X-men. Batman and Superman, on the other hand, had been mainstream media successes for decades by then and were not solely seen as comic book characters. Mr Glass's thesis that comic books are a form of instinctive expression of hidden truths about humanity is kind of swamped in the contemporary zeitgeist, where the rights to comic books are apparently a license for film studios to print money. Ironically, of course, that's very likely how Shyamalan finally got to make "Split" & "Glass".

So when deciding what to see, just remember, it's not the MCU or the DCU and Shyamalan isn't aiming for that. Whether you think he hits the target or it's worth aiming at, is a more personal question, but the film is well-done, the four leads give their usual good performances. I thought it was pretty good, but your mileage may vary.