Unbreakable//Split//Glass

Disclaimer: I will be spoiling the following three movies. These are M. Night Shyamalan films, so obviously they have twists, cuz, you know, that's his thing! Perhaps it's a spoiler that I'm reviewing these movies together if you didn't already know they were connected, but it has been over a year since the last movie came out so I figured everybody already knew about that. 

Unbreakable

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Cast: Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Wright, Spencer Treat Clark, Charlayne Woodard

Released: November 22, 2000

Viewed in theaters: November 23, 2000

Split
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Cast: James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy, Betty Buckley,  Brad William Henke
Released: January 20, 2017

Glass
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Cast: James McAvoy, Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Sarah Paulson, Anya Taylor-Joy, Spencer Treat Clark, Charlayne Woodard

Released: January 18, 2019

So who knew M. Night Shyamalan directed a trilogy? I didn't until Glass came out and I heard it was Bruce Willis and Sam Jackson reuniting as their characters from Unbreakable (nineteen years later!) I also knew that James McAvoy's character(s!) from Split was in it, but I didn't realize there was an Unbreakable connection in Split; rather I just assumed Shyamalan thought that character would work well with the Glass storyline; but as we find out, there is a connection between all three movies.

In Unbreakable, we are introduced to a seemingly average man named David Dunn (Bruce Willis) who lives with his wife, Audrey (Robin Wright) and tween son, Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark) in Philadelphia where he works as a security guard at a stadium. However, we soon learn that David is not that average as he is the only survivor of a train derailment. Not only did he survive it, but he didn't even break his bones or get a scratch on him. The way the scene is shot where the doctor (played by Michael Kelly) is telling David all of this is very Shyamlanian. It reminded me of the famous "I see dead people" scene in The Sixth Sense (just no iconic lines!)

Not surprisingly, his story makes the news and one man in particular is intrigued by David. He is Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) who has a genetic disorder called osteogenesis imperfecta which means his bones are very low in density and are easily broken. He mentions he's broken fifty-four bones in his life, but during a scene in Glass, he will mention he's had ninety-four breaks in his life, so that means he's broken bones forty more times in the nineteen years (or seventeen years....I'm a little confused by the timeline, but I'll explain why later) since the year 2000. Despite all the breaks, he has Type 1, which is the "tamest" version. There are four types and Type 4 is the most severe and, therefore, most deadly.

Elijah owns a comic book art gallery called Limited Edition and writes a note to David on his business card asking him, "How many days of your life have you been sick?" David finds the note under his windshield wiper and he and Joseph visit Elijah at his store. David can't remember the last time he was sick, but figures there must have been a point sometime in his life he's been ill. Maybe the guy gets flu shots. I get flu shots every year and I've been really lucky that I never get really sick where I just want to stay in bed and sleep all day because I'm so miserable. Sure, I have days I may feel sluggish, but nothing severe or anything. The last time I was really sick, like had to call in to work because I was legitimately contagious and go to a doctor was in 2014.


Elijah, being a comic book nerd, proposes the theory that if there's somebody like him in the world who can easily have his bones broken, then maybe there's an opposite of him in the world, somebody who never gets sick and whose bones never break. David tells him that as a child he did almost drown so he did have a near death experience, but Elijah believes that means that water is his kryptonite (just like with the aliens in Signs...oops, hope I didn't spoil that for anyone!) I have to say this movie is ahead of its time as you see Sam Jackson in a comic book store where there are a lot of Marvel comics and posters and cutouts of Avengers characters (I remember seeing one of Spider-Man).

We see Elijah's love for comic books started when he was a child when his mother (Charlayne Woodard) gives him a comic book titled The Battle with Jugaro and tells him, "They say this one has a surprise ending" (haha, Shyamalan, I see what you did there). It is a little messed up how she makes him get the comic book, though. She has it wrapped in a box that's sitting on a bench in the park that's across the street from their apartment where they can see it from their window. She wants to make him work for it to prove he can do anything despite having brittle bone disease. There are a lot of kids playing on the playground and one kid literally runs right in front of the bench with the present that has a big shiny bow on it. I am really surprised no one took it. If this happened in the real world, no way that gift is staying there longer than five minutes! Perhaps he also took a penchant to comic books because kids called him "Mr. Glass" because he breaks like glass and if that doesn't sound like a :::coughcough::: villain from a comic book, I don't know what does.

Joseph tries to test a few theories that his dad may be a superhero. When David is lifting weights in their basement, he asks Joseph to remove a few of them and after he lifts them again, he asks his son how much weight he removed and Joseph tells him he added more. They both want to see how much more he can lift and after using 350 pounds of weights, they add two (full) paint cans to each side. Now that he has proven his dad has super strength, he also wants to prove that he's invincible so in a very tense scene, Joseph, who has found his dad's gun, has it pointed at David and plans to shoot him to prove to him that nothing will happen to him. Both of his parents are rightfully freaking out and telling him to put down the gun. I had to laugh a little when he said "I'll only shoot once." David threatens to leave if Joseph shoots him. So either Joseph shoots and kills him and loses him forever or Joseph shoots and injures him and David leaves. Joseph is hurt by this and says he thought they were friends to which David replies, "Friends don't shoot each other." True dat! To Joseph's parents' relief, he puts the gun down.

Elijah pays David a visit at the university stadium where he works. As they're both standing next to a line of people waiting to get into the stadium, David points out a man to Elijah who thinks may have a weapon because he's wearing a large coat. He says it's just an intuition, but in a scene earlier we saw David brush up against the man and this is how he knows the man is dangerous. Well, he doesn't know he has this ability yet. Of course, the dude just looks straight up shady so I don't think you need to have any premonitions that he has a weapon. As David correctly predicts, the man turns and leaves the line once he sees David start patting down random people. Elijah follows the man down the subway stairs to see if David was right about him. The guy is walking too fast for him and as Elijah is trying to keep up with him, he slips and takes a nasty fall down the stairs and I'm just like, OUCH. For some reason, his cane is made of glass (terrible idea) and just shatters everywhere. Yeah, it looks cool in the movie, but don't use a cane made out of glass. Just not a good idea.

When David realizes he has a gift of being able to see the past crimes of people who he comes in physical contact with, he decides to hang out at the train station where he comes in contact with a whole bunch of folks who have done some terrible, terrible things. It seems every time he comes in contact with someone, the crimes they've committed just get worse and worse. We see a woman who has stolen expensive jewelry, then we see a man who has raped a passed out woman, then we see a janitor who broke into a home and killed the father. Writes note to self: never go to the Philly train station. In this scenario, the wife and two daughters are bound and gagged in their own home and David goes to rescue them. I didn't really understand why this janitor/home intruder/evil man was doing what he was doing: did he have a history with this family? Was he there to steal something and wanted the people out of his way? Obviously for the movie they needed David to be a hero because after he rescues the two girls (the wife does not make it) a sketch of him in his now trademark green poncho is in the paper and when he shows it to Joseph, he immediately knows it's his father and now knows what he knew all along: that his father is a superhero.

So as with any M. Night Shyamalan movie, you know there is a twist coming up. It had been nearly two decades since I last saw the movie and while I remembered the comic book aspect of the movie, I couldn't remember what exactly the twist was. When I re-watched it again, I was like, Wait, that's the twist? That's not a twist. That's so obvious! Maybe back in 2000 it would have been considered a big reveal. David shakes Elijah's hand and we see that Elijah has been involved in some terroristic events including starting a fire at an apartment building, a plane crash, and the very train crash that David survived. We see a security video of him leaving the unattended and unlocked front car of the train. Um, no way this would be plausible post 9/11! Good thing this movie came out a year before when security was a lot more lax! Elijah tells David, "We are connected, you and I" and that he had to make "so many sacrifices" just to find him. He did all these horrific acts because he needed to find the one person out there who was his antithesis and to do this he had to kill a lot of people along the way to find the one person who he wasn't able to kill. Yikes! 

You know when you're watching a movie based on a true event and there's usually text on the screen giving you an update on where these people are now? Well, that happens in this movie which makes it super cheesy, especially since this is not based on true events (duh). Why don't we see a scene of Elijah at an institution for the criminally insane instead of being told it with text on the screen? Just feels super unnecessary to me.

So now we jump sixteen years ahead to the next movie. The way Split begins is a little contrived. We need three girls -two of who are very close friends and one an outsider - to be in the same place at the same time. Claire is having a birthday party at a restaurant and invites everyone from her class, including Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), the weird loner girl who has no friends. At the end of the party, Casey's ride is late and she tells Claire's father she can take the bus home, but he insists on driving her home along with Marcia, Claire's best friend.


The movie starts immediately once Claire's father is incapacitated offscreen by a man (James McAvoy) who gets in the car. Claire and Marcia are in the back, talking and don't realize the man in the driver's seat is not Claire's dad until a full minute in. Casey, is too scared to say anything and is wondering if she should bolt. When Claire confronts the man, telling him he's in the wrong car, he sprays them with something to make them unconscious and the three of them wake up in some cellar-type room. They can peep through a keyhole where they see another room with a locked door, so they know escaping isn't going to be easy. When they hear a woman's voice talking to the man and see someone wearing a skirt and high heels through the keyhole, they start yelling to be rescued. They are all shocked when it is revealed it is their captor talking in that voice and wearing the skirt and high heels. They just stare at him (her) in disbelief when he (she) tells them: "Don't worry, I'll talk to him. He listens to me. He's not well."

It doesn't take long before they realize they are being held captive by someone with DID - dissociative identity disorder, probably more well known as having multiple personalities. I imagine this has to be a dream come true for an actor to play. James McAvoy plays a character with 23 - soon to be 24 - identities. I believe he only plays eight of them in this movie, but we will see even more of these personalities in the next movie. Aside from the big one we will see at the end, there are really only four personalties that get to come "out into the light". These include a nine-year-old boy named Hedwig who loves rap music and dancing and saying "etcetera" at the end of his sentences; a religious woman named Patricia who has a slight Scottish accent (might as well since McAvoy is Scottish); Dennis, who is the one who kidnapped the girls and always wants to make sure everything is clean and makes the girls take off their clothes if they get dirty (plus he's kind of a perv...); and Barry who is into fashion and is usually the one who contacts and talks to their therapist, Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley) who is an expert in DID.  Not only do they each have their own wardrobe, McAvoy gives them each their own distinct personality in the way he talks, his mannerisms, and the way he carries himself. It is very impressive acting.

I don't know much about DID - in fact, I didn't even know it was referred to as DID; I just always called it multiple personalities - but there is something fascinating and creepy about it. It's just unfathomable that someone can have a completely different personality from their own, or several, as is the case here. I assume doctors have ways of diagnosing it and being able to tell a person really has DID instead of just pretending to. We see a scene of Dr. Fletcher giving a seminar where she says there are moments when two identities can take "the light", or the conscience at the same time and talks about a time when it happened with somebody she was working with who was taking notes at the same time with both hands and each hand was writing something different with a different handwriting. The different identities in Split are able to communicate with each other, as when the girls heard Dennis and Patricia talking to each other. There's also a scene towards the end of the film when McAvoy is looking into a mirror and all the personalties are communicating with each other and the camera pans from McAvoy to his reflection. It's very reminiscent of the Gollum/Smeagol scene in The Two Towers.

I'm sure Hollywood movies and shows about DID over exaggerates it greatly and I'm sure Split is no different. I read that people with DID were most likely abused as children or suffered some great trauma as a child which is what we see happen to Kevin Crumb, who is the person played by McAvoy with all the personalties. While we don't get too much of his backstory, we see flashbacks of his mother getting furious with him for not cleaning his room and coming after him with a hot iron in her hand. He most likely created all these personalities as a coping mechanism. Dennis, the personality who is a neat freak, was one of the first to appear and he protected Kevin by making sure everything was clean because if anything was dirty, it would set his mom off. We'll explore more about his parents in the next movie, but I still have a lot of questions.

The two non-entity girls (don't get too attached to them) think if all three of them take him on at once, they can fight him and escape, but Casey doesn't agree to the idea because she knows it won't work. The girls really want to escape because they were told by Dennis that they are "sacred food" and one of the girls think he has a dog he wants to feed them to. She's not totally off-base. When they get a clue from Hedwig that there may be a way out, Claire finds a way through the ceiling and ends up running through a long hallway and in a locker room. I was very confused where they were until it's revealed at the end (I guess what was a bit of a twist too). Dennis fixes the ceiling and keeps all the girls separated, especially after Marcia also tries to escape when Patricia is making a sandwich for her and Casey and she hits Patricia with a chair, but since the door is locked, she doesn't get too far.

Casey has formed somewhat of a bond with Hedwig, the personality who is stuck at the age of nine. After Hedwig mentions he likes to dance to music in his room and has a CD player next to his window, she gets him to trust her by telling him that she gets in trouble at school on purpose so she can get away from everyone and be alone. We see flashbacks of her as a young girl who would often go on hunting trips with her dad and uncle (Brad William Henke). Through each of these flashbacks we learn something about her backstory each time, like the fact that her uncle started sexually abusing her at a very young age and that he is currently her guardian because her father had a heart attack when she was still quite young. Casey doesn't share all of that with Hedwig, but with what she does tell him, he sneaks her into his room and starts dancing to Kanye West. Watching a man in his late 30s dancing to rap music while pretending to be a nine-year-old is both super weird and oddly endearing at the same time. However, Casey can't appreciate his dancing because all she sees is the CD player by a drawing of a window on the wall. There are no actual windows to be found. When she asks Hedwig about this, he gets mad and accuses her of trying to escape. He shows her a Walkie-Talkie that one of the other personalties stole from someone and she takes it and when she finds out she can get in communication with someone on another line she tells them who she is and that she's been abducted. The person thinks she is joking and pretending to be someone else. Hedwig becomes Dennis and is strong enough to overpower her and take the Walkie-Talkie. I thought there was going to be a payoff with this scene later on, but there never was.

Dr. Fletcher knows that Kevin has twenty-three personalties and knows all of them quite well. She usually talks to Barry, who used to be the dominant personality until Dennis and Patricia started taking over and limiting Barry's time in the light. (Not really quite sure how it all works). Barry told Dr. Fletcher about the other personalties and when Dennis is talking to her, pretending to be Barry, she knows it is not him and correctly guesses that she's really talking to Dennis. She also knows the only way to talk to Kevin is to say his full name, but she doesn't want to do that because it would be chaos for the other identities and she doesn't want to hurt them. She is dismissive that Dennis insists that there is a twenty-fourth personality getting ready to emerge. When she receives many urgent e-mails from Barry she visits his place and this is when she discovers the three girls. He turns into the Beast, which is this animalistic being who becomes very large in stature and has thick skin (literally) and can crawl up walls and all these unnatural traits that no human should have. Before he crushes the doctor to death, she has written a note with his name on it, with the instructions, "Say his name." The two non-entity girls are trying to escape by trying to hook a wire hanger and catching a slide bolt and the movie almost makes you think they're going to escape, but no. They are chow for the beast. Dennis had kidnapped the girls as an offering to the Beast who apparently will only eat the "impure young". But, hey, if anyone was wondering, at least Claire's dad turned out to be okay.

Now Casey is the only one left alive and running for her life from the Beast. She finds the paper from Dr. Fletcher and screams, "Kevin Wendell Crumb" and the man that is the host body for all these personalties appears and is very confused. He asks Casey if it is September 18, 2014, as that is the last day he remembers. When he realizes he's done terrible things, he tells her where his gun and bullets are and instructs her to kill him. That would be utterly terrifying to realize you haven't been yourself in over two years; it would be like be in a walking coma. The other personalties start to come out and once again the Beast emerges. By that time, Casey has found the gun and bullets and has barricaded herself into a cage, but the Beast easily bends the bars after Casey has shot him, but the bullets just ricochet off him. When the Beast sees cut marks on Casey's body, he realizes that she has been hurt just like he has in the past and runs off, sparing her life.

She is rescued by someone who finds her and helps her. This is when it is revealed that she was at an old building at the zoo the whole time where Kevin worked. I thought maybe this was the big twist and while it was a surprise, it wasn't THE twist. We see her in a cop car and when the (female) cop tells her that her uncle is there to pick her up, Casey just looks at her and you know she's going to tell her about her uncle. She does because in the next movie she's living with a foster family and mentions her uncle is in jail.

Okay, now for the big twist. Hot take: Split has the best Shyamalan twist. If only because you didn't see it coming at all (as long as you weren't spoiled!) I've already put my spoiler disclaimer at the top. So obviously I knew about the Unbreakable connection so the big reveal at the end wasn't a big shock to me, but it was something I wasn't expecting to see, because, as I mentioned earlier, I assumed Shyamalan made Unbreakable, then sixteen years later makes Split as a totally different entity, then makes Glass as a sequel to Unbreakable and decided he could incorporate the Split characters into that one. It would have been super fun to watch the movie in the theater and see that reveal without being spoiled. I have to wonder if I would have even gotten it. I think I would have, but not right away. First we hear the music the was prominent in Unbreakable, which I definitely wouldn't have remembered. As I literally saw Unbreakable a few days before I watched Split, I instantly recognized it. Then we see Bruce Willis sitting at the end of the diner wearing a uniform with his character's name on it. I know I wouldn't have recognized his character's name, but being that he's only been in two (at the time) Shyamalan films, it pretty much narrows it down to Unbreakable, well, because, you know. And the woman next to him acknowledges him so she can see/hear him, ha! On the news, they are talking about Kevin and mention he is being referred to as "The Horde" because of his multiple personalties. When the woman mentions how he reminds her of "that crazy guy in the wheel chair that they put away 15 years ago" and is trying to remember his name, Bruce Willis is revealed as he says "Mr. Glass." I bet audiences (the ones old enough to remember Unbreakable!) were freaking out when they realized this movie had a connection to Unbreakable and there would undoubtedly be a sequel. Pretty cool.

This takes us to Glass. I'm a little confused by the timeline because it is mentioned that Casey's classmates were killed only three weeks ago, but it is also mentioned that the events of Unbreakable happened nineteen years ago, which would be "real" time. (Although, technically, it really should have been eighteen years since Unbreakable came out in very late 2000 and Glass opened the first month of 2019...but who's paying attention to minute details like that?) So does that mean that Split took place in 2019 as well? Then why does the woman at the end of the movie mention Mr. Glass being put away 15 years ago? Ahh, who really cares that much, right? I guess Shyamalan just didn't catch that. He did catch something else that made me laugh just because it really wasn't that important. So you know how he always has a cameo in all his films, like he was the doctor in The Sixth Sense? In Unbreakable he plays one of the people who David comes into contact with at the stadium and it is revealed he is a drug dealer and/or user. In Split he plays a security guard who works at the building where Dr. Fletcher lived and she uses his help to track Kevin. In Glass, David owns a home security store (his cover when he's not fighting crime) and Shyamalan as the security guard is seen purchasing some extra cameras for the building. He is obviously the same character he was in Split, but then he asks David if he used to work at the football stadium and when David confirmed he did, Shyamalan's character is like, "Oh, I thought I recognized you. I used to hang out there with a bunch of shady people when I was younger, then I turned my life around." Okay, first of all, you KNOW someone tweeted @MNightShyamalan right after they saw Split and asked him if that was supposed to be the same character from Unbreakable and Shyamalan figured he better make that clear in Glass, so he threw that throwaway line in. Second of all, how the hell would he remember a security guard at a crowded stadium from nineteen (or fifteen depending on what timeline you're going on) years ago?? I call B.S.! Nonetheless, it was a super amusing scene.

Since Elijah goes by Mr. Glass and Kevin now goes by The Horde, David also has his own superhero name and he is referred to as The Overseer. His son, now grown, is the only one who still knows his father's true identity and helps him track the Horde where he now has four cheerleaders held hostage in an abandoned factory.

I heard an interview Spencer Treat Clark gave on a movie review podcast and he said after some of his friends saw Split, they were telling him he had to see it and he just assumed it was because he worked with Shyamalan in his youth; he had no idea about the Unbreakable connection until he saw it. Luckily for Shyamalan he was still acting as a young adult, but I wonder if he still would have taken the role if he retired as a child actor? Obviously Bruce Willis and Sam Jackson are back, too (well, duh, the movie IS called Glass) and so is Charlayne Woodward in old age make-up as Elijah's mother. The only person from the original movie who isn't back is Robin Wright as Audrey David's wife. She is mentioned as having died from leukemia five years ago. It's possible that they tried to get her, but she had other projects that didn't allow her, but honestly, they didn't really need her.

David is able to find The Horde and rescue the four girls before the Beast is about to maim them. While doing this, he was tracked by Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) who apprehends both of them (with the help of some armed men) and takes them to Raven Hill Memorial Mental Institution for psychiatric treatment. She tells the two men, who are kept in separate rooms that she specializes in a "particular type of delusions of grandeur: those who believe they are superheroes." David is kept in a room where the walls are equipped with 46 high pressured nozzles which are all connected to a 15,000 gallon water tank right outside which will only be triggered if he tries to escape and Kevin is kept in a room that has strobe lights that go off and change his personalties if he gets too close to the door and ends up confusing him. If Dr. Staple is telling them they're not really who they think they are, then why do they need all these safety precautions to make sure they don't escape?

 The same main alter egos that we saw in Split - Dennis, Patricia, Hedwig, the Beast - are mainly used in this one, but we do see even more of Kevin's other personalties in this movie, especially with the use of the strobe lights. These include a Spanish-speaking woman and probably my favorite, a man who specializes in Japanese cinema from the 1950s-80s. Can you get any more specific than that?

The big scene in the movie is when David, Elijah, and Kevin are all together in the same room, but it was a bit of a disappointment because the characters don't interact with each other, rather they are speaking with Dr. Staple. Well, not Elijah as he doesn't speak until an hour into the movie. David had an MRI taken and Dr. Staple tells him that his front lobe has a "questionable cloud" and that it could mean it's damage from the train accident. She seems to have an explanation for everything that could prove these men are akin to comic book characters. She tells Kevin (well, he wasn't technically Kevin, but I forget which personality he was in this scene...) that he probably learned how to rock climb through videos. When he challenges her and asks how the Beast was able to pull apart the iron bars on the cage she tells him due to the cage's old age, she was able to pull them apart by putting a wrench between them and leaning back and said it was, "difficult, but possible" (yeah, but the Beast didn't use a wrench!) and when he challenges her even further and asks how the Beast survived being hit by bullets, she tells him the gun and bullets were old and the cartridges were compromised from the moisture in the room.

So, yada, yada, yada, we learn that Elijah has been pretending to be catatonic this whole time and his first line of dialogue comes about an hour into the movie when he sneaks out of his room and into Kevin's room where he talks to a few of his personalties and wants to meet the Beast as he has big plans. Earlier in the film we had seen him looking at a local magazine with a picture of a gaudy building called the Osaka Tower, claiming to be the tallest building in Philadelphia. The headline read "The Osaka Tower - A True Marvel" which is obviously a nod to the comic book franchise, though there is obviously a nod to Die Hard and the Nakatomi Plaza, and you know, Bruce Willis.

He tells David that they are going to Osaka Tower where the Horde will be revealed. There are three floors that house a chemical company and Glass is planning to blow up the building with those chemicals. Well, he certainly is telling the right person about this because if there's anyone who can stop a terrorist at a skyscraper, it's John McClane! The movie takes a bit of a detour when the characters never actually go to Osaka Tower, which turned out to be a red herring, and instead have their big showdown in the parking lot of the hospital.

During this time, the Beast has been somewhat of a sidekick for Glass, killing anyone who might get in their way and treating him like a God. However, when Joseph lets it drop that Kevin's father was on Eastrail #177, the exact same train that was derailed because of Mr. Glass and everyone died except for David Dunn, the Beast quickly turns on him. Yes, that's right. It all ties together. So apparently there's a scene in Split where one of Kevin's personalties (again, I can't remember who) is at the train station where he buys flowers and places them on the track in remembrance of his dad. While I remember this scene, I just never made the connection. Now it's like, duh.

So we get a few more details about Kevin's upbringing, but I'm still confused. When we see Kevin's dad on the train, he is reading a book about DID therapy and treatment and it is mentioned he was on his way to see a doctor. A couple questions: first of all, why is he leaving his son with his wife (I assume they were still married, but I don't know for sure because why would he want to be married to such a horrible, horrible woman)?  He knew she was abusing him, right? I mean, I don't know how you miss a mark from a hot iron and God knows what other signs of abuse he had. Why in the hell is he leaving his son alone with this woman?? Also, why didn't he just take Kevin with him? If he's seeing a doctor about his son, then why isn't Kevin going with him so he can be diagnosed? Yes, I realize that if Kevin went with him, he would have died in the train crash and therefore there would have been no movie so it defeats the whole purpose, but, c'mon. Glass tells a seething Beast that if the crash hadn't happened, Kevin would never have been left alone with his mother and if she never continued to abuse him, then the Beast would never have been born. Before the Beast dropkicks Glass, he tells him that his main priority is to protect Kevin and he cannot trust him to keep him safe.

So more yada, yada, yada, to my surprise, all three of the main characters end up being killed by Dr. Staple and her group of armed men. It turns out all along she was part of a secret society who do believe that super heroes and villains exist, but don't want them being known to the public because "there just can't be gods amongst us". But, unfortunately for her, she is unable to keep it secret because she finds out that Glass had streamed the live security feed (it was alluded to several times that the entire hospital inside and out was covered in cameras so their whereabouts would be known at all times) to a private site and the videos showing the three of them doing extraordinary things like lifting a car over or bending steel or crawling across a wall are sent to his mother, David's son, and Casey. The three of them upload the videos that this society didn't want anybody to see and soon everyone in the world is able to see that super heroes and villains do and can exist.

So while I loved that all these movies tied together and he made a sequel to Unbreakable so many years after its release, I felt Glass was a bit of a disappointment. I guess it just didn't live up to my expectations. I was expecting David and Elijah to have more screen time together since they have so much history from the first movie. This is more like a psychological thriller than an actual comic book movie which fine with me because I wasn't expecting a Marvel movie or anything. I think my favorite part of the movie is when the credits rolled and there is a list of 24 names next to James McAvoy's name. I laughed when I saw that.

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth

Jurassic Park
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough, Joseph Mazzello, Ariana Richards, Wayne Knight, Samuel L. Jackson
Released June 11, 1993
Viewed in theaters: Summer of '93

Oscar nominations:
Best Sound (Won)
Best Sound Effects (Won)
Best Visual Effects (Won)

Without doubt, the score to Jurassic Park (how did John Williams not get nominated for it? Although he still won that year (for Schindler's List) and I'm sure he has a billion other awards, but still...) is super iconic and probably in the top five for most recognizable movie scores ever. So while you read this review, it's only fitting that I set the mood by providing you with said iconic score. Then you can come back and listen to it again while you view the images of cute/cartoon dinosaurs I found on the web! By the way, if for some reason, you have never seen this movie (or read the book!), there WILL BE SPOILERS!

If you stop to think about it, dinosaurs were an impressive species. They lived on this planet for 165-175 millions years. Humans (modern humans, anyway) have only been around for a couple hundred thousand years. We have a long way to go before we even reach the dinosaurs! I'm sure if you have ever taken an anthropology class, you have learned that if the timeline of the Earth (nearly four and a half billion years) was condensed down to the span of a day, humans wouldn't appear until the last minute of that day. We are just a speck in the grand scheme of things, especially compared to the dinosaurs.

Want to hear something that will blow your mind? Dinosaurs were first here between 231 and 243 millions years ago and they went extinct 65 million years ago which means they were on Earth longer than they've been gone!

Not surprisingly, dinosaurs, in some form or other, have been featured in many movies, but none have been more popular than Jurassic Park and its successors (but we all know the original is the best) as it features the most "realistic" dinosaurs, even though we now know that dinosaurs had feathers. I do like that line in Jurassic World where Henry Wu states that their dinosaurs don't look like the dinosaurs of the real world because they use a different genetic code. It's a smart way for the series to acknowledge that the dinosaurs they created wouldn't look exactly like the dinosaurs that once roamed this earth.

I remember this movie being a big thing when it came out. If you were around in 1993 (and old enough to remember), then you remember what a big deal Jurassic Park was. It was THE summer movie of 1993. Hell, it was THE movie of 1993, period. While I'm sure I saw many previews for it, I don't remember them. Maybe I didn't remember them because they never show any of the dinosaurs which would never happen today. True, they can show the dinosaurs in any of the new Jurassic World movies because we know what they look like, but I think that if Jurassic Park came out today, they would have shown the dinosaurs in the trailers.

I honestly don't remember if I had any desire to see it, despite the hype. (Sure, I may find dinosaurs fascinating NOW, but I was never a dino-obsessed kid). However, after my brother saw it with his friends and came home and was raving about it, well, you better believe I had to see this movie. There was no way my brother got to see this amazing movie and I was going to miss it! Uh-huh! So I begged my mom and she took me to see it. I don't remember having to twist her arm too much, so she must have been fine with it. So watching the movie, you would have thought all the jumping I did in my seat was a result of all the scary moments of dinosaurs popping up and attacking. Wrong! I jumped because my mom kept grabbing me every time one of those scary moments happened and that startled me more than anything that was on screen! Not surprisingly, this is one of my most memorable movie theater experiences!

I read the book a few years after I saw the movie. I must have been 15 or 16. My parents already owned the book because it was in our family bookcase. I remember it being very gruesome. Much more than the movie was. I actually re-read the book a couple months ago, and yes, it was as gruesome as I had remembered when I first read it. If they had followed the book faithfully, it definitely would have received an R rating! While the premise of the movie is the same, there are many differences between the book and film.

Tim and Lex (Joseph Mazzello and Ariana Richards) are in the book as John Hammond's (Richard Attenborough) grandchildren, but Tim is the older one. Lex is six or seven, and my God, is she ever f*cking annoying. I was hoping she would get eaten by a dinosaur, then I felt bad and had to remind myself she's only a young kid, but she was still super annoying. Her movie counterpart is much less annoying, although she has a moment of pure stupidity when she decides to take out a huge flashlight and turn it on when the T-rex breaks out of its barriers. Now I understand Spielberg's reasoning for this as you get that cool shot of the T-rex's eye dilating, but from the characters' standpoint, it makes no sense at all. Lex (and Tim! He knew! He told her to shut the light off!) is old enough to know that turning on a light is probably going to attract this huge animal with tons of sharp teeth! Luckily Lex gets her redemption when she is able to turn on the computer systems. ("It's a Unix system, I know this.") In the book, it's Tim who figures out the computers. It also makes me laugh when Lex is excited that the Jeep has an "interactive CD rom!" Whoopty-do!

Another huge difference is that there are a lot of characters who live through the movie, but die in the book or vice versa. Gennaro (the lawyer who is sitting on the toilet when he gets eaten by the T-rex) lives through the first book. It is mentioned in The Lost World novel (which I also read recently) that he died of dysentery on a business trip. I guess Michael Crichton just killed him off since he was already dead in the movie. There is another character in the book (the park's public relations manager) who was with the kids in the Jeep and he gets scared and runs out and gets killed by one of the two T-rexes (yet ANOTHER difference..in the book there is an adult T-rex and a juvenile T-rex and he gets killed by the smaller one). Another character who survives in the novel is Robert Muldoon, the overseer of the velociraptors. You may remember him from the beginning of the film when he yells "SHOOT HER" when one of his men gets attacked by a raptor, then when he calls a raptor a "clever girl" after being ambushed and killed by another one.

Park founder John Hammond, geneticist Henry Wu (BD Wong), and even mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) all notably survive the horrific day on Jurassic Park (along with our other main characters) as Hammond will make a small appearance in The Lost World; Malcolm also comes back in the second movie and makes an appearance in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom; and Wu is in both of the Jurassic World movies. Well, surprise, surprise! They all die in the book! I'm just as surprised as you are! (Well, not really, I already knew about Malcolm's resurrection from the dead and I had a feeling Hammond was going to die). Wu (who has a bigger part in the book...he's only in that scene in the beginning when they're watching the raptor hatch) is killed by raptors and gets a very nasty ending. (He's basically still alive while the raptors are ripping him apart...yikes.) While there are issues with John Hammond in the movie (like the fact that he doesn't think there's anything wrong with cloning dinosaurs and eventually opening a theme park with them), he is absolutely horrible in the book and therefore I knew he was going to die a horrible death. He comments how he wants to make a dinosaur park for all the children to enjoy, then snidely remarks, "All the rich kids, anyway." I mean, he's probably right. The park that was open for ten years that we saw in Jurassic World? You KNOW the same rich families were going year after year, thus the reason they were getting "bored" with the same old dinosaurs. Damn bratty rich kids. Hammond even (internally) curses his own grandchildren (he's much more grandfatherly in the movie!) and his grandkids are kind of the reason he dies! They're playing with a sound system that allows them to play different dinosaur calls and he gets scared when he hears the T-rex, thinking it's close and ends up twisting his ankle or something where he can't really walk very well. There are these little scavenger dinosaurs called procompsognathus (compys) that are not in the first movie, but will play a big part in the next film, as they do in the novel. These things are just pure evil and eat anything that's wounded and can't run away and you can try to shoo them away, but there's so many of them, you can't get away from them, and well, Hammond becomes a buffet for a bunch of them. Yeah, not a pretty way to go. I do recall a scene in The Lost World where somebody (I'm presuming a bad guy!) gets killed by them. Then you have Ian Malcolm who, in the book, gets attacked by the T-rex, then breaks his leg when the large animals throws him. He is said to have died from his wounds, but obviously he is brought back to life in the next book. At least he just had a bad wound, so it's plausible that he didn't really die. Now, if he had died the same way as Nedry (Wayne Knight aka Newman), there's no way he could have survived that as Nedry was dead as a doornail (doorknob?) His death is much more gruesome and graphic in the book! He does get killed by the same dinosaur as in the movie, a dilophosaurus. You get a little bit of foreshadowing of this dinosaur in the beginning when they're taking the Jeeps through the park and the dilophosaurus is the first dino that's featured and the announcer tells them it spits venom into its prey's eyes to paralyze them...and that is exactly what will happen to Nedry in a few scenes. In the book, it is ten feet tall, which is more accurate, while in the movie, it's about the same height as Nedry. It also didn't spit poison in real life and didn't have the frill around its neck.

Speaking of dinosaurs that Jurassic Park took liberties with (well, mainly Michael Crichton), the velociraptor that once roamed this planet is not at all what we see in the movies. They were still something you wouldn't want to come across, but they were a lot smaller, the size of turkeys. Apparently, legend is, the dinosaurs that are described in the book are actually more in line with the deinonychus (never heard of it), but Crichton thought "velociraptor" just sounded cooler and more menacing. And, yeah, he's right. Nobody goes around saying what a fierce and ferocious creature the deinonychus (die-non-uh-cuss) was, but thanks to the success of Jurassic Park and its following movies, everybody and their grandmother have heard of a velociraptor. And they're getting all the credit! Poor deinonychus! I remember a time when no one even knew what a velociraptor was. They might as well just switch the names! Do you think that irritates paleontologists when they watch this movie? There's probably a lot of things that irritate them when they watch this movie (like the dilophosaurus having a neck frill and being able to shoot poison); that's why I'm glad I'm not one, otherwise I wouldn't be able to enjoy Jurassic Park! 

Speaking of things that probably irritate paleontologists, this probably doesn't come as a huge surprise, but if you did encounter a T-rex, it would be able to see you even if you were standing still, contrary to what Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) says. I guess a paleontologist must have informed Michael Crichton he was wrong (that scene was in the book, right? I honestly don't really remember. To me, the movie is cannon, not the book!) because there's a scene in The Lost World novel where a character (a bad guy, of course) gets eaten by a T-rex because he was misinformed about a T-rex not being able to see him if he just stood there, and nope! Not true! Also, the scene when paleo-botanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), Malcolm, and Muldoon are in the Jeep driving away from the T-rex, it would have easily been able to catch up to it and overturn the vehicle. I recently read a book called The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs by a young paleontologist named Steve Brusatte and he touched upon the mistakes the film made.

This movie establishes that opening a theme park with real life cloned dinosaurs is a terrible, terrible idea. (And Jurassic World PROVED it!) I would say Jurassic World was worst in that it was a full-operating theme park and there were many people there that day (although the fatality rate didn't seem to be that high considering there were carnivorous dinosaurs running around!) In Jurassic Park, there was only Hammond and his crew and his guests and grandchildren. The park seems so antiquated compared to what we would later see in Jurassic World. And the dinosaurs didn't seem to be very well contained....especially when the power went off so they could escape from their cages which were held with power lines.

I don't know, if you were going to have a dinosaur theme park, why not start with some simple and non-threatening ones? Why have the T-Rex? I sure as hell wouldn't want to go anywhere near that thing! And then why even create raptors when you know they are one of the most vicious and intelligent of the dinosaurs. (Until Chris Pratt will come along 20 years later to train them!) I mean, when Muldoon tells Grant, "They should all be destroyed" when talking about the raptors, maybe you should listen to the expert! Is Hammond just not thinking about this stuff? At least when his grandchildren are in trouble, he seems to realize what a mistake he made. Just because you CAN do something outrageous (like clone dinosaurs) doesn't mean you SHOULD. This theme is brought up in the movie (and the book). How did Hammond think he was going to feed his sauropods which are easily more than four times the size of an elephant (if not more)? And how much livestock was he going to need to feed all the carnivores? And did he not stop think that the air dinosaurs breathed nearly 65 million (and beyond) years ago would be drastically different from the air we breathe today? Moral of the story? Don't play God!

Jurassic Park is just a little over two hours long, but yet dinosaurs are on screen for only fifteen minutes! I was really surprised when I first learned this fact. I know it takes awhile before we actually see a dinosaur, but I would have guessed at least 30 minutes of dino screen time. Even though a dinosaur may not be shown at all times, we are constantly reminded we are in the midst of them and the atmosphere gives us the perception they're always around even though we may not physically see them. And when they are on screen, they make a huge impression on us (the T-rex attack; the raptors in the kitchen; the flock of gallimimus; the seemingly cute and harmless, but extremely dangerous dilophosaurus, etc.).

What do you call a blind dinosaur? Doyouthinkhesaurus! What do you call a dinosaur that nobody's ever heard of, but is actually the star of Jurassic Park? Deinonychus!

Double Identities

The Long Kiss Goodnight

Director: Renny Harlin

Cast: Geena Davis, Samuel L. Jackson, Craig Bierko, Brian Cox, Davis Morse

Released: October 11, 1996

For a movie approaching its 20th anniversary, the action scenes hold up quite nicely and are still thrilling to watch. This was probably the third, maybe fourth time I've seen this movie and I'm still not quite sure what the plot is! All you need to know is that Geena Davis's character has amnesia and Samuel L. Jackson plays a detective trying to help her. When we first meet our main character, her name is Samantha Caine and she tells the audience she was "born eight years ago", that she doesn't remember anything prior to those years. She has an eight-year-old daughter named Caitlin, but doesn't know who the father is and she is seeing a guy named Hal (who is such a nonentity in the movie that I had to look up his name). She lives in a small town in Pennsylvania and teaches at an elementary school. She's the kind of woman who plays Mrs. Claus in the town's Christmas parade, doesn't curse, and scolds the next door neighbor boy for smoking. 

Memories began to trickle back after she suffers from a concussion after she gets into a horrific car accident when she hits a deer and goes flying through the windshield. This is just one of many scenes where something that should kill, or at the very least, break a few bones of one of the characters, happens. But she's just bloodied and is able to stand up and break the neck of the deer who is still alive and suffering. She breaks the neck with such ease that it makes you wonder if she's ever done this before. She has a dream that night where she's looking in the mirror and sees a woman who looks like her, except her hair is blonde and cut shorter and the woman tells her that her name is Charly and they'll soon be meeting. 

One afternoon, Samantha is cutting carrots and isn't doing a very good job as she cuts her finger, then, all of a sudden, she is cutting the carrots like she's a five-star chef and tells her boyfriend and daughter to give her more vegetables to cut. She declares she must have been a chef in her past life and throws a tomato followed by the knife which pins it to the wall. This freaks out her boyfriend and daughter to which she tells them, "Chefs do that." Another day, she takes her daughter ice-skating, but Caitlin falls on her arm and starts crying and Samantha starts talking to her in a gruff voice, in a tone we've never heard her take with her daughter before. She tells her to stop being a baby and that "life is pain - get used to it." Remember this speech because it will come back later.

A one-eyed man who has escaped from jail after seeing Samantha (or, "Samantha" I should say!) on TV during the Christmas parade (seriously, a small town televises that? And some guy in jail is watching that?) comes to her house ready to kill her. The home fight is very reminiscent to the fight Uma Thurman and Vivica A. Fox have in Kill Bill with a Home Alone-esque fall thrown in there when the guy slips on some M&Ms that have spilled. In a ridiculous scene, Samantha throws her daughter through the hole the guy has just blown through her house with his gun and into her tree house which is several feet away from the house. Luckily his gun has run out of bullets, but he's about to get a large knife when they're fighting in the kitchen, but she's able to stop him with a lemon meringue pie in the face....well, actually it was the glass pie pan that knocked him out and gave him a nasty gash across the face. She gives the man one final blow to the head and breaks his neck (as we saw her do earlier with the deer). We later learn that in her previous life, Samantha, then Charly, was nearly killed by that same man, but stuck a syringe in his eye.

Knowing that her boyfriend (er, fiance, maybe?) and daughter aren't safe until she gets some answers, Samantha hires a private detective named Mitch (Samuel L. Jackson) to help her. They head out on a roadtrip with a suitcase that is full of clues to Charly's past. (I'm just gonna refer to her as Charly from now on so it doesn't get too confusing.) There's a phone number she calls and reaches a man named Waldman (Brian Cox) who tells her that there are people out there trying to kill her and wants to meet her at the train station the next morning. When she sees a man approaching her, Charly (still in Samantha mode as Charly wouldn't do something so dumb), stupidly asks the man if he's Dr. Waldman and the guy, obviously NOT Waldman, begins to take out a gun, but fortunately Mitch is armed and she grabs his gun and shoots the guy. The main bad guy of the movie, Timothy (Craig Bierko) is also there with his henchmen who are blocking all the exits when Charly and Mitch try to escape. They run upstairs to the third floor and hide behind a wall, ready to shoot at any bad guys, but their plans are thwarted when a grenade is tossed their way. They run down the hall, the only way out is a window which Charly shoots at. Then, as they're falling, she shoots at the frozen lake below them. It's a cool action scene, but highly implausible. First of all, the fact that she was able to use a gun while falling from a third-story building? Please! Second of all, the fact that when they fell in the ice-covered lake, they were lucky to come up in the same spot. Third of all, hypothermia didn't seem to be a factor for them as they get out and run back to their car. And there are scenes that are a lot more insane than this one!

As they're still running from the bad guys, the real Waldman drives up to them and tells them to get into the car. He tells Charly the truth about her past: that she's an assassin working for the U.S. Government. They decide to ditch Waldman when Mitch smartly brings up that he was the only one who knew they were going to be at the train station and how did those guys who attacked them knew they would be there? To be honest, I was never sure if Waldman was a good guy or bad guy because he doesn't last very long in this movie. Hmmm, I guess I just answered my own question as he is killed by a definite bad guy.

Charly and Mitch find another clue that leads them to a man named Luke (David Morse) who Charly believes was once her fiance and is most likely the father of her daughter. He seems like a nice enough guy, but surprise! He's one of the bad guys! The reason Charly has such vivid memories of him is because he was a target and she learned a lot of things about him. Something like that. Waldman, who found out where they went, comes to warn them, but more evil henchmen get to them before they can escape. They knock out Charly, kill Waldman, and lock up Mitch. When Charly wakes up, she's tied to a water wheel which Luke uses to torture her for prolonged amounts of time under the water to get information out of her, but on her third trip under the water (which she insists on taking, so you think that would have been his first clue not to take her under the water again!), she gets out of the rope her hands are tied in and grabs the gun out of the now dead Waldman who is now under the water and when she comes back up, she shoots Luke and rescues Mitch.

This is around the time Charly fully starts to emerge and all traces of the goody-goody Samantha are completely gone. She physically transfers herself by cutting her long curly brown hair and dying it blonde and putting on gobs of makeup which looks absolutely ridiculous. I like the hair, though.

There's this scene where she has to get back to Mitch fast because the bad guys have come upon him and attacking him, so she grabs a pair of skates and starts skating across a pond with a gun strapped to her back. I'm sorry, but in the time it would have taken her to put on and lace up those skates, she wouldn't have been able to get there in time. I also could have sworn that this was the movie where a bad guy dies from getting an ice skate blade across the throat. I know there's a movie out there where a woman escaping from a bad guy is on skates and picks up a child and swings the child around to slice the bad guy's throat with the blade of the ice skates. What movie am I thinking of???

It turns out the father of Charly's daughter is Timothy (guess Charly had to go undercover and get really close to him...eww...). He kidnaps the young girl and locks both her and Charly in a large freezer and turns down the temperature. In a very MacGuyver type move, Charly takes Caitlin's doll, which is filled with gasoline (don't ask) and tries to light a fire with some utensil, but can't, until her daughter gives her a package of matches which she has because she lights a candle every night. Seriously, why did she let her mother try to light a fire for five minutes when she had matches at her disposal? Caitlin asks her mother if they're going to die and I did get a bit of a chuckle when Charly replies with "No, sweetie, they are" and lights the fire which explodes the entire building. It also knocks Mitch, who is tied to a chair and is about to get shot by Timothy, out of a second story building window and through a billboard sign and he hits a tree. He must have flown at least 100 feet. That should have EASILY killed him, or, at best, broken a bunch of bones. But nope! He is able to stand up and walk away. WTF? He only has a few scratches and there's blood running down his face.

So there's a bomb in a big semi truck and as Charly and Caitlin escape, they are ambushed by the bad guys and Charly tells her daughter to go somewhere safe, so she runs and hides in the truck with the bomb. Charly ends up driving the truck out of the town and there's more excitement as she kills more bad guys and tries to save her daughter. Which she manages to do, but is so exhausted and can't move anymore after she tells her daughter to run away from there. Caitlin does leave, but comes back and gives Charly the exact same speech her mother gave her when they went ice-skating and uses the line, "Life is pain." This awakens something in Charly and she gets up to finish the job of killing Timothy. Let's just say the bomb does its part in killing him.

The movie ends with a nod to Thelma and Louise (which is so much better than this movie, but perhaps it's unfair to compare the two!) as we see Geena Davis driving a convertible and wearing a headscarf. We also see her living a happy life with her boyfriend (probably now husband) and daughter. This movie has some great action scenes, but I found myself not caring about the story.

The Negotiator

The Negotiator
Director: F. Gary Gray
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Spacey, Ron Rifkin, David Morse, J.T. Walsh, Paul Giamatti, John Spencer
Released: July 29, 1998

I had seen The Negotiator about twelve years ago, but hadn't seen it since, so while I remembered the general plot, I didn't remember who was revealed as the bad guy in the end. Danny Roman (Jackson) deals with hostage situations and the film begins with one where he's trying to talk a crazy man from shooting his daughter. You see that he is very skilled at his job and knows how to talk to people to get them to do certain things and the tables are soon turned when he finds his partner has been murdered. Roman is framed for his partner's murder (unfortunately he just so happened to be at the scene when the police arrived because his partner had asked to meet him at this location). Roman knows that someone on the inside had his partner murdered because his partner had information that would implicate this certain someone.

Roman decides to take matters into his own hand and ends up taking the Internal Affairs office of a government building hostage because he knows that's where he'll find something that will disprove his guilt. For some reason I thought he had taken many people hostage, but the only people he's holding is Niebaum (Walsh), the man who he believes knows the truth about who murdered his partner, Neibaum's secretary, a shady fellow played by a pre-famous Giamatti who provides the comic relief, and a cop (Rifkin) who works with Roman. He also takes two more police officers when they come in through the window.

Because Roman is a negotiator, he knows all the tricks his team has planned to get him out of the building and tells them he will only talk to Chris Sabian, another skilled negotiator who works with another police department in Chicago. He believes Sabian is the only one who will be able to understand and help him and he knows Sabian has had a great record as a negotiator with no deaths. Sabian is played by Spacey and he doesn't show up until forty-five minutes into the movie which seems like quite a long time for your second lead to appear in a movie!

As one might expect, there's plenty of finger-biting moments, especially during one scene when Roman is talking to a fumbling police officer while they're waiting for Sabian to appear on the scene. The police officer keeps saying the wrong things to Roman who points this out to him and threatens to kill someone the next time the officer says "no" and Roman keeps baiting him and asking him questions where it's impossible to say "no". (Such as "Have you ever cheated on your wife?)

We know one of the cops on the scene is the one who had Roman's partner killed and is framing Roman. The obvious one would be the one played by Morse because it was established early in the film that he wasn't particularly fond of the way Roman handled the hostage situation and he demands that they take a shot at him every time they have a way to take down Roman. He just seemed too obvious to be the one who was the mole so I knew it wasn't him.

It's kind of funny because when I first saw this movie the only actors I knew were Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey and I was familiar with some of David Morse's work, but that was about it. Now when I watched it a second time, I recognized a lot more people: Paul Giamatti, of course, along with a bunch of actors I recognized from TV: Arvin Sloan from Alias, Leo McGarry from The West Wing, Walter White's brother-in-law from Breaking Bad, Detective Jim Brass (he played the murdered partner) and the coroner guy from CSI. They're all in this movie.

While I think this movie is great and highly recommend it, there is something that bothers me: I understand that Roman wanted to clear his name and see who was really behind all of this, but he had to know that holding people hostage at gunpoint (and not to mention causing some major property damage) wasn't going to be taken lightly and most likely he would have been sent to jail for that, but the movie just ends with him finding out who the bad guy is and going to the hospital for his injuries. I guess he got immunity since he was framed...I don't know...well, it's a good movie nonetheless!