You can give M. Night Shyamalan this: when he has something to say, he wants to be damn sure you know it. With Glass, the conclusion of his comic book trilogy begun with Unbreakable and continued in Split, he joins Brad Bird as one of the few directors to earnestly look for metaphors for pop culture’s current superhero obsession. Like Bird, he’s drawn to the idea of individuals at odds with suppressive normalcy. Unlike Bird, he sees this in quasi-New-Age-spiritual rather than cranky-political terms. So where Bird’s two Incredibles films are a pungent, even dangerous balance of cynicism and idealism, Shyamalan does his best to stay starry-eyed.

The comparison, however, doesn’t do favors for Shyamalan. The first issue with Glass is one of showmanship: the film is riddled with jokes that don’t land, suspense teases that don’t hook, and horror stings that don’t horrify. But the very existence of Glass in 2019, while the Marvel Universe climaxes, is fascinating to consider, starting with the fact that anyone expecting a superhero action movie will have to wait. The bulk of the film is spent with Shyamalan’s heroes and villains (Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, James McAvoy) locked in a hospital and forced into therapy, where a psychologist played by Sarah Paulson—misguided? evil? play along—tries to convince them that they’re just ordinary men with delusions of grandeur. When the showdowns do come, they’re often filmed indirectly or restrained by close-ups. The film even teases a big Marvel-scale skyscraper brawl before letting it drop in favor of a tight grapple instead, as if Shyamalan has determined to keep any spectacle as earthy as possible. This may sound like some sort of genre subversion is being attempted, yet the opposite appears to be true. Glass, like no film since the partly lovely, partly insane, mostly awkward Lady in the Water, positions Shyamalan as the guardian of something sacred in these kinds of stories.

At one point in the film, Samuel L. Jackson says that children, unlike adults, have the ability to see the world the way it really is. That philosophy has never exactly been airtight, but it has made for some good films over the years; Spielberg, at his best, has elevated it to lyricism. But the second issue with Glass is that, where the best Spielberg films demonstrate, Glass can only exposit. Its central idea is that we might recognize comic book tropes as a possible truth if only we showed more humility towards the mysteries of the universe, and this is expounded upon until it becomes both academic and illogical. The film is better served by the moments when it does demonstrate—like having two super-villains, in the middle of their escape, subtly conspire to stage the mise-en-scene of a striking shot, purely because the world would be too mundane if they didn’t.

It’s easy to see why any director, particularly one with Shyamalan’s track record, would like the symbolism of where this is heading: heroes and anti-heroes busting out the doors of an institution to turn their aberrations into strengths for all the world to see. For the last 20 years, Shyamalan has operated principally in a blockbuster mode, and the context has made his flaws more apparent and his virtues more complicated to build a consensus around. He stumbles over pre-fab elements that this town is designed to spit out like clockwork. But his films, the good and the bad, feel like 21st century blockbusters beamed in from some alternate world where blockbuster priorities are different. When it works (Unbreakable), it’s exquisite. When it flops, it feels nakedly inept in the way only a sincere artist can be. With Glass, it’s simply ungainly and unsatisfying. But if audiences are indeed still willing to attend and debate this quest, I’d call that a good thing. (For whatever reason, my thoughts on Split are, to my surprise, this blog’s most trafficked post by a wide margin).

So it’s both strange and appropriate that his most anticipated film in years is his equivalent of a great many unsatisfying but more corporately-guarded threequels. Its flaws are not unlike the bloat of The Dark Knight Rises, or Spider-Man 3, or X-Men: The Last Stand: lopsided and misconstructed, at once too short and too long, muddling the tone, losing the earlier sense of discovery, and letting moments that should ring with finality instead land in a puff of exhausting anticlimax. Only for Shyamalan, the overextended maximalism doesn’t manifest in the form of action or plot threads or set-pieces. It manifests in the form of a statement—big, proud, and inarticulate.

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