10 Awesome Movies That Fail In The 3rd Act
6. Glass
M. Night Shyamalan's Glass was the hotly anticipated conclusion to his trilogy of unexpectedly linked superhero films, preceded by Unbreakable and Split.
Split quite neatly teed up a final film in which Kevin Wendell Crumb aka The Horde (James McAvoy) - a man with 24 different personalities due to his dissociative identity disorder - would battle the heroically invulnerable David Dunn (Bruce Willis).
And for its first two thirds, Glass does a stellar job of building up intrigue and getting the chess pieces in place for an expectation-defying closing clash between both the two, along with genius supervillain Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson).
Yet what follows can really only be described as a damp squib.
For starters, the fight between Kevin and David takes place in the blandest location imaginable - a greyer-than-grey car park, which while seemingly by design on Shyamalan's part, feels like an act of smug subversion merely for its own sake.
Beyond that, the film ends with all three central characters dead in largely underwhelming ways, particularly Dunn, who is drowned in a puddle by a random SWAT team member after Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) reveals that she's a member of a secret society seeking to eliminate superhumans.
Even the final scene, where video footage of the superhumans in action is uploaded to the Internet, comes off as hokey and unconvincing. In a world where deepfakes exist and it's becoming ever-harder to discern the truth from fiction, would this video really make much of a dent at all?
Easy though it is to respect Shyamalan's desire to basically give us the exact opposite of an MCU movie, he forgot to make it even basically satisfying.