‘Glass’ Corners Shyamalan’s Characters Into a Dead End

Glass is M Night Shyamalan’s Avengers ensemble. However, unlike the high-budget showdowns of the superhero cosmos, the auteur of twists is a darling of the masses for how smoothly he shaves your mind. Oh, the twist…well there it was all along!

Glass is also a parable of Shyamalan’s career. More than the movie, it’s the character of Mister Glass, played by Samuel L Jackson whose other moniker is Elijah Price. He is the brittle-boned genius whose mind is his devious superpower. Shyamalan who launched one of Hollywood’s great success stories with The Sixth Sense two decades ago degenerated into many twists and turns before partially coming onto life with Split in 2016.

Like Jackson’s wiseacre, Shyamalan too can’t stop mouthing his philosophical musings. Flops or fragile bones, no one can halt his march of deeper meanings.

This is the third entry in Shyamalan’s trilogy on superheroes and supervillains, though fan theories have coined a special term for it―Eastrail 177 trilogy. It takes off with Bruce Willis’ David Dunn playing a low-cost Batman of Philadelphia aided by his ‘Alfred’ son (a very grown up Spencer Treat Clark from Unbreakable). He dons a hooded poncho to find criminals and thrash them out of their senses. It takes no time for Dunn to find Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), the kidnapper cum serial killer who has taken some high-school students as his hostages in a rundown basement. Yes, the same Kevin we met in Split who juggles multiple personalities including a dreaded monster called the Beast (not to be confused with the hairy bookworm of the X-Men universe). A quick combat later, both of them find themselves in a mental institution in which is also lodged the fragile-boned supermind, Mr Glass.

All three characters under one roof, quite a conceit for a superhero film. Shyamalan wipes out the expectations of action set-pieces by quarantining the events in one place, and treks on to curate an oppressive interpretation of the mythology of superheroes by employing Sarah Paulson’s Dr Ellie Staple who interrogates all the three men.

What follows are a string of scenes that are pleasing at first, because McAvoy’s constant shift of characters evokes both wonder and surprise, in contrast to Dunn’s low profile and Price’s sedated presence. But this initial sensation of curiosity slowly disintegrates into exasperation. McAvoy’s showboating turns tiresome, as does Staple’s constant dissection of the comic book lore.

She insists that what these men believe are just hocus-pocus, thus casually flinging water on the fire of geekdom. Superheroes are not real. They are just suffering from ‘delusions of grandeur’.

All these analyses were very cool when Unbreakable greeted us many moons ago. It was a time when superherodom on the big screen was at its nascent stage. Price enlightened the nerds of the world with an unusual theory that comics were not throwaway fancies but our last link to an ancient way of passing on history.

But then MCU and DCU happened, and superheroes have quite literally altered the way mainstream movies think. The character of Price, a personification of all the boys who never grew up, a geek who yearns to be understood along with his obsessive world of heroes, villains and justice, has gone so mainstream that it sells as merchandise.

The obscure has become the popular, starting with an introduction, moving on to a celebration, and then subversion, and now waiting for another cycle.

At such a juncture, Shyamalan’s sentimental earnestness about superheroes anyway feels like a terrible repeat because he deliberated on this theme already in Unbreakable. And this time around, all he’s done is again pondered over this idea, and cornered his characters into a dead end instead of opening new doors.

While Dr Staple keeps barking her clunky lines, the narrative becomes a deer in the headlights.

It just doesn’t know where to go. Shyamalan’s doggedness on his ingenuity ends the chamber drama with an anti-climactic climax and a Bollywood twist.

So much so that it actually robs the sheen and intrigue of the characters he has so cleverly built in Unbreakable and Split. In retrospect, he has diminished his viewers.

(The writer is a journalist, a screenwriter, and a content developer who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. He tweets @RanjibMazumder)