It’s also necessary after decades of centering white men to champion characters like Kamala Khan. The girl who bullies her at school isn’t the head of some “Mean Girls” clique, just another more successful internet influencer with 80,000 followers.īut those moments are part of what makes this series sing. Her relationship with BFF Bruno (Matt Lintz) has hints of romance, but there’s no huge unrequited crush story. There are no mean or racist teachers, just a young millennial guidance counselor who clearly respects Kamala’s nerd game. Even her teen problems aren’t your stereotypical hardships. Kamala (Iman Vellani) is introduced as an ordinary Muslim teenager, living at home with overprotective parents and an older brother who clearly love her to death. Just about every superhero tale in the MCU (and in the DC Films universe) focuses on loners whose powers help them find their community. And a distinctly pop music-focused soundtrack uses extremely current songs in a way that few shows outside Netflix’s big budget dare to do.īut it’s also the lack of a “found family” story that sets this show apart. When characters text each other, their messages and emojis appear on street signs or float by in bubbles. Animated fantasy sequences featuring teen-drawn characters look like they flew off the pages of a standard composition book. The vibrant visuals alone are a treat, and they feel far more comic-booky than your standard Marvel story. Marvel” neatly avoids feeling like something you’ve seen before. In short, Glass is anything but bulletproof.But “Ms. The action is slow-paced and short-lived, there is a fierce lack of suspense, and the latest in a long line of twist endings winds up being a little less Sixth Sense and a little more Signs. It sacrifices its ingenuity for something the audience is already accustomed to, or in today’s superhero renaissance, tired of. Where Glass falls short is in its tendency to rely on common superhero tropes. What made Split and Unbreakable so great was their transcendence of the superhero genre: how they effectively integrated extraordinary characters into an ordinary world, redefining what it means to be unique. But alas, they are subdued and forced into the uninspiring main plot. I found myself wishing that the rest of the film focused on Dunn’s pursuit of the elusive Horde. The first act is undoubtedly the most interesting. The film is about half an hour too long while still spending a lot of time in stasis, twiddling its thumbs in anticipation of the next far-fetched revelation to advance the already choppy plot. What should be a mind-bending and monumental conversation is actually little more than a condescending Staple belittling them one by one. Even the highly anticipated scene of the psychiatrist confronting all three at once is a letdown. The actor’s ability to transform his voice, attitude, and mannerisms on a dime is truly astounding.īut the others bring their own special brands of dullness - Jackson from his shortage of dialogue and Willis from his shortage of, well, effort. He displays previously unseen personalities, as well as the classics we hate to love and love to hate. McAvoy once again steals the show as the multiple-personality-wielding criminal, acting circles around even his acclaimed co-stars. Despite the audience’s lack of motion sickness, it’s still very evident that this is still evidently a textbook Shyamalan movie that’s as fun to look at as it is to poke holes in. This time around, Shyamalan spares his camera operators the acrobatics and opts for more sophisticated shots, toying with reflections and shifting focus. But of course, you’ll be less confused throughout if you’ve seen the movie’s predecessors. Glass does a decent job of catching up unfamiliar viewers without pandering to them: it employs multiple flashbacks with new footage taking advantage of Willis’s inability to age (the actor’s real life superpower). Psychiatrist Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) attempts to cure the trio’s superhero “delusions” after they’re institutionalized, at which point mediocrity ensues. Then we have the nearly indestructible David Dunn (Bruce Willis) who now acts as a vigilante crime fighter, while his mastermind nemesis Mr. The Horde (James McAvoy), who grapples with dissociative identity disorder (DID) and is now able to summon on command his most dangerous personality, The Beast. The film centres on three superhumans in the real world, where no such people should exist. Like its parent films Unbreakable and Split, Glass strips away the glamour of superpowers and blurs the distinction between hero and villain, but this third outing doesn’t deliver its premise with the same allure that made its predecessors so successful. Night Shyamalan does not fulfill either aspect. Walking the fine line between fantasy and reality is a daunting feat for any filmmaker, and unfortunately, M.
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