Glass Reviews: 12 Early Reactions You Need To See

11. The Script Is Messy & Exposition-Heavy

"[Shyamalan's] writing here often doesn’t hit the target; where Unbreakable was a smart, simmering deconstruction of comic-book tropes, Glass veers towards the heavy-handed, with characters disseminating his ideas through clumsy dialogue." - Empire

"One of Shyamalan’s worst tendencies is to not let a clever idea just be clever. Glass‘s overall schtick, a cerebral thriller that follows the beats of a comic book, is a smart one, but Shyamalan falls a bit too in love with his own form. He’s not just showing you a cool thing, he needs you to know why it’s cool in context and needs to explain every layer of subtext. By the end of Glass, every single main player has transformed into Jamie Kennedy‘s character in Scream, a cacophony of know-it-all experts shouting at each other—and the audience—about The Rules of comic book storytelling. This is especially grating in 2019, when your six-year-old nephew could probably write a treatise on how this stuff works." - Collider

"We waste an entire movie watching a shrink trying to convince our comic book characters that they aren’t comic book characters (while constantly repeating story beats from the first two movies), at the expense of new journeys for David, Kevin and Elijah whom we wanted to see… actually being superheroes and supervillains (or at least interacting with the world)." - Forbes

If you were hoping that Glass would follow Split's lead and keep things relatively simple, it sounds like that's sadly not the case at all.

Numerous reviews cite Shyamalan's penchant for overly expository dialogue bringing back bad memories of his high-profile failures such as The Last Airbender and After Earth.

The decision to have much of the movie focused on Sarah Paulson's Dr. Staple attempting to gaslight the three superhumans into believing they're not super was also roundly criticised, because of course, the audience knows they are in fact super-powered.

While a few commended Shyamalan for at least having the balls to commit to an out-there vision no matter how messy, most expressed disappointment at how sloppy it all comes together.