By EWAN McDONALD
(Herald rating: * * * )
Eagle, with Dan Dare, and Roy Of The Rovers were the cool comics when we were kids. Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) favours superhero stories, preferably the high-price first-editions that he sells from his comic bookstore/art gallery.
Elijah was born with his bones broken
and has spent a lot of his life being sick. So frail that the kids at school called him "Mr Glass." He walks with a limp and a cane and by the end of the movie will use a wheelchair. So Elijah is intrigued when he reads about a security guard in his home town who is the only survivor of a major train wreck; even more surprised when he finds the man, David Dunne (Bruce Willis), has never been sick in his life.
M. Night Shyamalan, who made the intriguing The Sixth Sense with Willis, produces another dark, slow-moving and absorbing drama in which he cleverly distracts the viewer from the ending until the last possible moment by composing half a dozen smaller pictures — Elijah's private life, David's job, marriage problems (Robin Wright Penn is superb as an almost-drained wife: will she/won't she leave him?) and his relationship with his son.
As always, Jackson is intelligent, this time cut with bitterness. Willis, moving far from his brainless action movies these days, is subtle, a man in crisis at work and at home. Only the ending is a little unsatisfying, as though someone told the director he'd run out of time and had better knock it on the head.
Running time: 107 mins
Rental: Now
