M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass was sold as the ultimate payoff: the long‑awaited showdown of Bruce Willis’ Unbreakable hero, Samuel L. Jackson’s Mr. Glass, and James McAvoy’s terrifying Horde. After 18 years, fans expected a mythic collision. What they got instead was a sneering little demolition job that seemed far less interested in examing each of these men than in humiliating them. That’s not a tonal misstep, it feels like some weird, anti‑male execution framed as deconstruction.
The film constrains nearly all of its “action” inside a psychiatric hospital, where a smug, self‑assured psychiatrist, played by Sarah Paulson, works to convince all three men that their powers are delusions. She is later revealed to be part of a secret organization dedicated to hunting and eliminating people with real superhuman abilities. In other words, the movie’s moral authority doesn’t just question these men, she contains, discredits, and erases them. The heroes are systematically dismantled by an institutional regime that answers to no one but itself.
And then comes the ending (SPOILER ALERT). Mr. Glass is murdered. The Horde is gunned down. And David Dunn, the hero Bruce Willis fans had waited nearly two decades to see again, is drowned in a shallow puddle by her agents. Not in a heroic sacrifice. Not in a mythic fall. In a puddle. The image is laugh‑out‑loud insulting. The “unbreakable” male hero, the everyman, the gentle working‑class father, is treated like a bug under a boot. Obliterated in a humilating way, suggesting that the film’s creators view male heroism not as something to be honored or complicated, but as something to be broken and buried.
Glass - Official Trailer [HD]
If Glass were just a misfired finale, it would be disappointing. But the film leans hard into the idea that male power is inherently delusional, that masculine strength is a pathology to be corrected, and that the only “real” authority lies with a cool, rational, female‑led system that quietly erases extraordinary men. It feels like a calculated, almost gleeful anti‑male power fantasy wearing superhero drag. And none of this can be blamed on studio interference. Shyamalan intentionally kept the film’s budget tight to avoid studio interference, so every change, every twist, every bit of narrative flaying was his own. The studio didn’t twist his arm; he chose to keep it lean so he could execute his vision without compromise.
M. Night Shyamalan had long insisted he had an “operatic ending” in mind for his “Eastrail 177” trilogy dating all the way back to the original film from 2000, suggesting that the broad strokes of the conclusion were always part of a larger design. Yet comments from cast members implied that the ending of Glass was changed during production for reasons unknown. The original ending has never been revealed publicly, but the most common theory is that the film was meant to culminate in a large‑scale, public showdown at Osaka Tower. The entire structure of the movie builds toward that exact outcome. Characters repeatedly frame the story in comic‑book terms, explicitly promising a climactic, highly visible confrontation, only for the finished film to pivot to a contained, almost deliberately subdued finale. That disconnect led many viewers to speculate that what felt like Shyamalan’s signature subversion may actually have been the residue of a more conventional, more heroic ending that was ultimately set aside. I’m not convinced.
Our Reviews of the Eastrail 177 Trilogy
Glass doesn’t just fail as a sequel. It functions as a kind of ideological purge: an operatic resolution would have celebrated these male characters, but it was scrapped, and what replaced it was a quiet, cynical, almost clinical assassination of powerful men. Fans had waited 18 years after Unbreakable for a mythic payoff, but were handed a senseless execution. This was never intended to be any sort of “superhero” movie at all, it was always intended to be a small, methodical funeral for the male supers that it had spent years building up. Another incidence where Shyamalan’s habit of including a twist ending ruined eveything that had preceded it.
If you liked Unbreakbale and Split, skip Glass.
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English (US) · 