Underpowered would have been a better title

Rating: 3/10 (26 March 2013)

Imagine a film in which a man discovers he has super powers. In an exciting sequence, he escapes from a violent train derailing. To prove his powers, his son shoots him in the chest. The bullet bounces off. He then goes out on patrol, and in some tremendous action scenes, he defeats some villains. Finally he faces his nemesis in a stunning battle royale.
Sadly, all these things happen, but none of the them happen on-screen. M Night Shyalaman seems to have gone out of his way to make the acquisition of super heroism as un-super and un-heroic as possible. The Train crash happens off screen, the son is talked out of firing the gun, the fight scenes are a shambolic scuffle and the final 'surprise' ending the most anti-climatic possible with the actual denouement told in captions.
Amazing.
There is plenty of time for talk. And more talk. And trick camera angles which grow annoying after a while. There are ambling pointless scenes of the hero frisking an innocent man at the sports arena. Why? It adds nothing and seems only as a lame excuse to shoe horn Shyalaman himself as a cameo.
Another tedious and inexplicable scene is one in which Mr. Glass waxes lyrical about a comic book cover as a 'work of art'. Unfortunately the cover on view is the most generic comic book cover imaginable.
I cannot explain why Shayalaman has made the decision to concentrate on the prosaic rather than the miraculous in this story. Perhaps he wants to emphasise the 'hero inside everyone. Who knows? But it makes the film dreary and ponderous.
Nor can the script be said to be very subtle. Everything is laid out in black and white. This is especially true of the 'shock' ending, a more laboured script would be hard to find.