Not only does M. Night Shyamalan have the coolest name of any director out there right now (i wish i was named NIGHT!) but he also directs some really beautiful movies with twisted endings that you never see coming. I am sure that you have heard that The Sixth Sense, his last film, had a surprise ending. Well, i won't go into details, but i didn't see the ending of this one coming either! Brilliant!

The movie stars Samuel L. Jackson as, Elijah, who has a genetic disease that makes his bones weak. The other kids refer to him as "Mr. Glass" as a child, and he retreats into a world of comic books and superheroes. He becomes obsessed with David Dunn (Bruce Willis), who walks away from a terrible train wreck without a scratch.

Elijah theorizes that Dunn is a "superhero". Not to say that he's from Krypton or was bitten by a radioactive spider, but rather that he epitomizes a real phenomenon that comic books, as a type of literature, distort and modify. Elijah thinks that comics tap into a certain cultural subconscious of our need for heros and myths, and these myths get exaggerated and stylized by marketing. He thinks that since there are people with special differences, like his bone weakness, and that there must be people at the other end of the spectrum. These people can do some extraordinary things, like not be harmed in a terrible train wreck, and that our collective subconsciouses transform this "special ability" into, say, the invulnerability of Superman. It's like The Hero With A Thousand Faces gone terribly awry.

As the movie progresses, you learn that Willis's character has never really been sick and has survived other terrible accidents without harm. Through his contact with Elijah he too comes to believe he is somewhat invulnerable, and that he has a special power to detect when people are doing evil. Some type of special instinct.

Anyway, Dunn does eventually perform a heroic deed, and you really get the sense that perhaps Elijah is right! Perhaps there are some people who are a little tougher and thus can serve as inspiration and defenders of the weaker.

Okay, i must stop talking about plot or else i'm gonna give stuff away. (Which would spoil the fun of the movie!) So lets talk about directing technique.

Apparently, in this film Shyamalan discovered the "reflected image". That is, there are lots of scenes in which the characters are reflected in a window, or picture frame, or something like that while they have their dialog. It's a neat effect, but i think that it might be a little overused. Otherwise, the filming is quite nicely done and serves to adequately move the film along.

So on the whole, it's a well-filmed movie with an interesting plot and a surprising ending. Well worth an afternoon.