Split
2016
*½
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Cast: James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy, Betty Buckley, Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula, Brad William Henke, Sebastian Arcelus, Neal Huff, M. Night Shyamalan
Kevin Wendell Crumb, who has 23 different personalities, kidnaps three teenage girls as offerings to the Beast, the emerging 24th personality who is a psychopathic monster. After his breakthrough with The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, M. Night Shyamalan has made a number of incredibly stupid and predictably twisty horror films. The good news is that this one reveals its secrets early on and gets silly only when the Beast arrives. The bad news is that the film is mind-numbingly boring from start to finish. It starts like any low budget exploitation flick, with the three girls imprisoned in an underground hideout and taking turns in shedding their clothes, but the story drags from one boring conversation to the next. As impressive as James McAvoy is in his multiple roles, the repetitive personality switches eventually wore me down. The very last scene links the whole thing to Shyamalan's back catalogue. Followed by Glass.
