Glass
M. Night Shyamalan combines his 2000 Unbreakable with his 2016 Split in a sort of Avengers Dissemble.
Beastly James McAvoy
There’s
nothing new about the cross-fertilisation of movie characters. As early as
1943, Universal Studios brought us Frankenstein
Meets the Wolf Man, while the same company’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) introduced the titular
duo to Frankenstein’s monster, Count Dracula and the Wolf Man. In the 1960s, the
Japanese were at it with King Kong vs.
Godzilla (1962), and more recently we’ve had Freddy vs. Jason (2003), Alien
vs. Predator (2004), et al. Now, though, it's an epidemic. However, M. Night Shyamalan’s foray into the sub-genre
takes on a slightly different approach and has involved no small amount of
narrative back peddling.
Following a dearth of sizeable hits since his
2002 Signs, Shyamalan has built on
the commercial success of his last film, Split
(2016), with James McAvoy, and threaded it into the fabric of his 2000 mystery-thriller
Unbreakable. The earlier film not
only starred Bruce Willis as an indestructible security guard but Samuel L.
Jackson as a man called Elijah Price, who suffered from osteogenesis imperfecta,
a condition that rendered his bones as brittle as, well, glass. In the new
film, Elijah insists on being called Mr Glass, which may suit his character but
hardly makes for a punchy moniker for a superhero movie. Avengers Dissemble might have proved more apt.
In Split,
James McAvoy excelled himself as a schizophrenic with 24 distinct
personalities, including a Hulk-like alter ego known as ‘The Beast’. The latter
transformation made him a scary antagonist – and a killer – but it was the
array of other disparate personalities that made McAvoy and, indeed, Split, so vastly compelling. Two years
on and James McAvoy – let’s call him Kevin – has kidnapped a quartet of
cheerleaders and is holding them hostage in an abandoned warehouse in
Philadelphia. However, he’s spotted by Bruce Willis’s indestructible David
Dunn, the latter acting as a vigilante (cf. Death
Wish), who uses his superpowers to apprehend the sinful. The resultant punch-up
spills out onto the street and both Kevin and David are arrested and confined
to a psychiatric research facility. There, they begin therapy under the auspices
of Dr Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson with a lisp), whose job it is is to rid her
patients of their delusions of grandeur. They think they’re superhuman, she
doesn’t. And, lo and behold, another of her subjects is Glass, Mr Glass.
While Samuel L. Jackson may hog the title
role, James McAvoy monopolizes the running time, which is a good thing. His performance
is a masterclass in metamorphosis. Even so, much of Glass feels like a set-up for something else and Shyamalan is at
pains to obfuscate the obvious, crosscutting between scenes and filling the
screen with disembodied voices, hands, the backs of heads, and so on. For a
while, this pervading sense of mystery keeps us intrigued and there are nifty distractions
along the way. I wasn’t bored. Besides, Shyamalan is a masterful filmmaker and
I enjoyed Sarah Paulson’s lisp. Of course, it’s one big tease and doesn’t fully
explain itself until the final line of dialogue when Charlayne Woodard, as
Elijah's mother, states, “I know what this is, it’s…” Unfortunately, due to the
actress’s enunciation (or the sound editing), the last line was lost on me. And,
frankly, I was left none the wiser.
JAMES
CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: James McAvoy, Bruce Willis, Samuel L.
Jackson, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sarah
Paulson, Spencer Treat Clark, Charlayne Woodard, Adam David Thompson, M. Night
Shyamalan.
Dir M. Night Shyamalan, Pro M.
Night Shyamalan, Jason Blum, Marc Bienstock and Ashwin Rajan, Screenplay M. Night Shyamalan, Ph Mike Gioulakis, Pro Des Chris Trujillo, Ed
Luke Ciarrocchi and Blu Murray, Music
West Dylan Thordson, Costumes Paco
Delgado.
Blinding Edge Pictures/Blumhouse Productions/Buena Vista International-Walt Disney.
129 mins. USA. 2019. Rel: 18 January 2019. Cert. 15.