The Shyamalan Story - Rise and Fall and traces of Rise again

The story of Indian-American director M Night Shyamalan is one of amazement and disappointment. The guy was called the next Spileberg 14 years ago, but things were not meant to be. To understand his career progress, let’s take a cricketing analogy.

Probably Not

So, there was this upcoming batsman who was highly talented. He was given a chance by selectors in an international match. And he hit 30 ball 100 in first match itself. All the balls went for either a six or a four.  He was on top of the world and got an opportunity in Test match. He was coached by international coaches. Some tried to straighten his footwork, some tried to change his grip. He again scored century in test debut, although not as flamboyant, but was soon called next Sachin. But then in next match he scored just 50, a small bump several thought. His scores in next few matches were 30, 20, 10 and 5. The selectors gave him one last match to prove his mettle, against Kenya. He scored 0. The guy who would hit six every other ball was not able to take single! People made fun of him. Called him next Vinod Kambli. He was not even selected for Ranji team. He went back to his roots. Left aside all that he learnt during international stint and practiced hard on his in-born talent. After toiling for months, he gets selected for his city team in a local match. He comes into bat late in the innings. He has gained some old confidence. He has gone back to his old style of footwork and grip. He is little worried that if he fails here he won’t get chance to play even for his society.

The first ball he faces, he hits six. He gets his mojo back.

The Visit (2015) is that six for M Night Shyamalan. We don't know if he will go on to hit another century but this is a fine return. It is not the best horror movie out there. But it is a brilliant effort from a director who has been made fun of, who had been ousted from Hollywood. The story of the movie itself is pretty simple. A single mother sends her two children to her parents’ house to spend a week with them. And as can be anyone’s guess, not all is well at grandparent’s house!

Shot in found footage format, this was not in Shyamalan’s alley but he holds well. The performance of two kids, a sister aged 15 and brother aged 13 is commendable. The sister, Becca, played by Olivia de Jonge, is an aspiring director and brings the sense to make this movie in found-footage format. She also brings some incredible skills and emotion to the movie. The emotion doesn’t always touch the cord but by the end you really want the kids to be safe. The brother, Tyler, played by Ed Oxenbould, provides comic relief, sometimes at the expense of a real scare. He likes to rap and uses the name of female singers in place of curse words. The comic timings could have been handled well. Shyamalan is still to learn the use of humor well. But the real winners are two grandparents, Nana and Pop Pop played by Deanna Dunagan and Peter McRobbie. They play the weird, scary old couple to the tee. The movie starts out as horror movie and turns into thriller in the third act. Although they could have made the third act little longer, but at 90 minutes, movie is crisp and provides what it set out to do. The final Shyamalan twist is not of The Sixth Sense kind but it instantly jolts you. You make all the connection and immediately set yourself for the thrilling final act. It has some preachy elements where people overcome their fears of things they hate in symbolism and the need to express anger. But these does not resonates as well as director want it to.

Becca and Nana

All in all, on its own, the movie just holds up good. But this is an important movie for what it achieves outside of box office, reviews and story. It is a comeback of M Night Shyamalan.

All the Shyamalan movies are famous or infamous for their twisted endings. The first big movie of M Night Shyamalan, The Sixth Sense (1999), is amongst the most epic suspense thriller. The final reveal of that movie has inspired several movie-makers since its release but none of them got it as brilliantly as Shyamalan did. Starring Bruce Willis, that movie is a quintessential one for a movie buff and Hitchcock lovers. The next one, Unbreakable (2000), was a superhero movie before the bombardment of superhero movies by DC and Marvel. But it was a superhero movie of another kind, where the hero does not fly or shoots web or drives batmobile, but still saves people. It was the most grounded superhero movie. It has since gained cult following due to it’s such a different arc. Both the movies starred Bruce Willis in main role.

Century on the debut

His third big movie, Signs (2002) was the first one that I had watched. It was an impressive movie for me at that time. Although I didn’t like the ending and later found that no one else did. At that time no one had doubted the talent of M Night Shyamalan to churn out one suspense thriller after another. The biggest of the producers were readily agreed to pour in as much money as required by Shyamalan to take his movie to grander scale. He was called the next Spielberg by Newsweek. His writing was crisp and all original, a rarity in an industry full of remakes and sequels. He could never go wrong, everyone thought. But boy they were wrong!

The big fall

What followed were some of the most criticized movies and biggest Hollywood duds like The Village (2004), Lady in the Water (2006), The Happening (2008), The Last Airbender (2010) and it all culminated in After-Earth (2013). In After-Earth, he had probably the biggest Hollywood star of the time, Will Smith and his son playing father-son duo on screen. There was nothing that could go wrong. But still, it flopped and it flopped badly. The Hollywood closed its door on him. That’s when he went on to make The Visit (2015). Considering that his last two movies were made on budget of $130Mn and $150Mn, the modest budget of The Visit at $5Mn tells you all about producers there is to know. It was not that he lost money for producers. The Last Airbender earned $320Mn and After-Earth made $244Mn internationally. It was just that the movies were panned universally.

By the time After-Earth was to be released, the producers made sure that Shyamalan’s name does not get highlighted on posters. At one point, he wanted to make Life of Pi, but didn’t do it because he believed that if his name was attached to the movie with twist ending, people won’t come to watch it and that would be unfair to the beautiful story that it is. Such was his lost confidence.

The Visit was the welcome relief for Shyamalan. The place where he wanted to be. There were rumors that After-Earth was pseudo directed by Will Smith. It may have made Shyamalan lose confidence in himself. Therefore it was necessary that he

Split (2017)

goes to his roots and make this movie at such a small scale. He has now again roped in a big Hollywood name in James McAvoy for next movie Split (2017), where McAvoy plays a guy with 23 different personalities. The trailer looks good, but it has always looked good for Shyamalan movie! It is important for Hollywood that Shyamalan succeeds for what he can bring to table is something of Hitchcockian level and Hollywood is in dearth of good original movies. In a world of sequels, prequels, spinoffs and remakes, Shyamalan may well prove to be a breath of fresh air.

The Visit is one horror/thriller movie that I have liked in a long while. It has shown us that he has still got his powers. Split will tell us whether he still knows how to use them, whether he should be playing just in the local city tournaments or is it in him to play international ones once again.

Here is the trailer of Split:

The Actors we lost in Stars – Part 2 : Tom Cruise

Relevance. That is pretty much what Hollywood actors are all about. How long is one present in the industry? How many important roles are they getting? How relevant are they for the movie industry?

Most actors degrade their best works by doing mediocre roles in their later career. We have Sylvester Stallone doing movies like Expendables and Bullet to the Head, Arnold Schwarzenegger doing roles in Escape Plan and The Last stand, degrading their iconic roles in Rocky, Rambo and Terminator. Even seasoned veterans like Al Pacino and Robert De Niro are not untouched by this phenomena. Closer home, yesteryear superstars like Rajesh Khanna and Dev Anand, capped off their legendary careers with highly forgettable movies like Riyasat (2014), Wafa (2008) and Chargesheet (2011).

Not so subtle beginning

But there’s one actor who has been highly relevant and still going strong after more than 30 years in the Hollywood industry. He has outlasted many of his contemporaries since making debut in a lead role in Risky Business (1983). Tom Cruise has worked in so many genres with so many iconic directors, that it is impossible for any future movie star to have so many credible movie to their names. He has worked with directors like, Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Brian De Palma, Cameron Crowe, Rob Reiner, Oliver Stone and even Ben Stiller! You don’t get to work with these directors without being a genuinely good artiste. He didn’t have an epic script always, he had great directors getting epic performances out of him.

The most well made heist scene

Since his rockstar pilot role in Top Gun (1986) as Maverick, stardom had been thrust on him. He stood up against Paul Newman in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986). For a while it was said that maybe he can only do these eccentric characters only. But time and again he proved his critics wrong by doing character roles in movies such as Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Rain man (1988) and A Few Good Men (1992). His court battle with Jack Nicolson in the finale of A Few Good Men is as classic as it gets. By mid-90s Hollywood had 2 superstars: Tom Cruise and Jim Carrey. There were many stars and many actors. There was Tom Hanks, Eddie Murphy, John Travolta, Nicolas Cage, etc. But these two were the most bankable of them all. And they both took different paths to lengthen their hold on top of pyramid. 

The Help me help you scene

While showing his action skills in spy thriller Mission Impossible (1996), he was also doing a role of subtle warrior in Jerry Maguire (1996). 1996 may have been his pinnacle in the long career. On one hand we got to experience an American James Bond in his role as Ethan Hunt, on the other hand we had Jerry Maguire where Cruise was veering into the territory of Tom Hanks! Jerry Maguire was his most restrained yet combatant role. This was Tom Cruise at his best. When you see him asking Cuba Gooding Jr to “Help me help you”, you just wish him to succeed and have everything in life. He made us attach to that selfish character. He then went on to do some extra-territorial work in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and Magnolia (1999). 

In 2002 came Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002), the first Tom

Futuristic. Directed by Spielberg.

Cruise movie I ever watched. Even at that time I realized difference between him and so many other action stars. He is so much professionally involved for even action movies like Minority Report and Mission Impossible series, which you didn’t get from other actors. You would never be worried about Jason Statham in Transporter series, or Matt Damon in Bourne series. But there’s something about his embroilment in his movies that it makes you cheer for him. Even at that time he was doing highly emotional movie like The Last Samurai (2003). Even his highly underrated Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004) has a stupendous performance from Cruise and a marvelous chemistry between Cruise and Jamie Foxx.

The moment that changed it all

But then, in 2005 came the turning point of his life. His appearance in Oprah Winfrey show changed his life and career for good. He was odd and seemed high for a bit, and then he jumped on the couch to express his love for Katie Holmes which was totally insane. Before that incident no one ever knew how Tom Cruise was in his personal life. He rarely gave one-on-one interviews and seldom discussed his personal life. But that one moment gave the tabloids the fodder it needed on this guy. And it destroyed his image in the eyes of his audience for a long time. Coupled with that, his support for religion of Scientology. A religion which has less thing to do with Science than even Harry Potter saga. Tom Cruise, after that incident was a peculiar and bizarre person in public eyes. Even though almost all the people who have worked with him has only good things to say. But in America, Tom Cruise is a living example of how Tabloid world can ruin a person.

This not only affected him in his personal life, but his career nosedived for a while. Even a brilliant screenplay and direction from J J Abrams couldn’t save Cruise’s tent-pole Mission Impossible 3 from being the least earner of the movie. It was more due to the fact that his off-screen persona was affecting his on-screen work. The movie was several notches higher than the previous one but still it failed at the box-office. He was never cast in a role of subtle aggressor like that of Jerry Maguire and A Few Good Men. Those roles were as perfectly portrayed by Cruise as it could have been by even the best actors of the industry.

The last great role

Although, we had Valkyrie (2008), where he played the role of Claus von Stauffenberg, who plotted to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944. As always he played his part to perfect, but it was very inconveniently ignored by audience and critics alike.

After that what we really got was one action movie after another. No doubt he was great in all of those. Knight & Day (2010), Mission Impossible 4 (2011), Jack Reacher (2012), Oblivion (2013), Edge of Tomorrow (2014) and now again Mission Impossible 5 (2015). To be fair, Tom Cruise still gives himself all in for these movies. He is one of the most hard-working actor. For the ridiculous amount of money he gets for his roles, he doesn’t let his directors down and gives intense performances every time. He does it all: the tough stunts, the smallest talk show interviews and those intense runs. He even does his own ridiculous stunts. Be it dangling from 150^th floor on Burj Al Arab or hanging on the side of Boeing as it takes off and travels at a height of 15000 feet. We are surely getting great superstar performances. But he has transformed himself into more popular and more talented version of Jason Statham.

The most insane scene of all time

But still we are missing something. We are missing a great Tom Cruise performance. We are missing a helpless rebel of Born on The Fourth of July, an indifferent but caring brother of Rain man, an adamant lawyer of A Few Good Men. We are missing a romantic Tom Cruise performance, we are missing a “You had me at hello” performance.

The most romantic scene of all time!

Is it all due to reluctance of directors to cast him in such movies or is it his own sub conscious decision? We may never know.

But in recent years the public perception of Cruise has turned little favorable even though he went through his 3^rd divorce with Katie Holmes. A small credit to this turn should go to his funny role in Tropic Thunder (2008) as Les Grossman. People were surprised to find that he has some funny bones in there. He did diverse roles earlier in his career, but has stopped taking risks in the characters he plays for last some years.

And there's a new Mission Impossible movie coming on August 7 which looks pretty incredible. Christopher McQuarry (writer of Usual Suspects) has directed it. So we can expect a strong script coupled with strong performance from Cruise. But it still is another action Cruise!

Yet another Improbable Mission!

Maybe someday he will combine with some great director again and turn a mediocre script into marvelous movie.

As a last superstar of Hollywood, who still draws in audience on his face value it will be a sad end if we remember his last relevant roles from his action and mission movies only.

PS: “Last Superstar? But Robert Downey Jr is a more bankable superstar” - The Judge (2014), his only solo original movie in recent years couldn’t gross $100 million worldwide ($83 Million). Tom Cruie’s least grossing original movie in last 10 years is World War 2 drama-thriller Valkyrie ($200 Million). So that's why: The Last Superstar.