I saw Split last year without any background information, not having seen even a trailer, possibly, with Friend at the Capitol Drive-In. I’m someone who’s had a love-hate relationship with Shyamalan, like I think a lot of people.
My older brother told me a story of going to an advanced screening of some festival movie and sitting through the trailers of a kind of cool horror film about the devil on an elevator or something, and the moment that Shyamalan’s name popped onto the screen, everyone in the theater started laughing and booing. I was 10 years old when Unbreakable came out. That was one year after The Sixth Sense. Shyamalan made The Village when I was 14, and I still hold a warm place in my heart for that movie, ditto Lady in the Water, which I appreciated as the offbeat comedy it appeared he intended to make. I know a lot of people made fun of Avatar: The Last Airbender, but I was just so psyched to see that movie on screen that I let a lot of things slide. Hell, I even saw The Visit, which, like did anyone else see that dumpster fire? I walked out of that movie having sweat through my whole shirt, because I’ll be damned if it didn’t set me on edge.
Even so, when the end scene of Split tipped its hand as a sequel, I couldn’t contain a surly “Fuck off, Shyamalan” or the automatic gag reflex that followed. He had taken a perfectly good, standalone film staring one of my favorite young actors of the decade, Anya Taylor-Joy, and succeeded in making me sympathize with a truly creepy villain. Why fuck that up with a trilogy twenty years in the making that no one asked for?
I’m not doing anything brave by sniping a month late at the final installment of a substandard trilogy by Shyamalan, but there was just so much potential here for the guy to actually comment on the state of comic book films after twenty years of reflection and the street cred to make a statement, á la Birdman or the Incredibles. Split had bought him time and goodwill to tell a challenging story, but instead we have a series of disappointingly bland close-up fights, a lot of awkward running on all fours by McAvoy, a lot of navel gazing, and cloying self-referentialism (including a too long explanation of the director’s second cameo).
Bruce Willis looks like he couldn’t be bothered to show a range of emotion beyond tired and bored. The premise for their treatment facility is pretty bonkers, as is the reason cited for allowing a teenage girl into the same room as her murderous abductor. The false bottom endings don’t feel clever. They feel cheap, like someone’s trying to get away with a windowless bedroom by putting hotel art on the wall.
We’re not mad, we’re just disappointed.
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