M. Night Shyamalan's Best Idea In Years.

Rating: 7/10 (28 January 2017)

This past Halloween I revisited The Sixth Sense(1999) to see how well the horror classic had aged. I remembered it being a perfect piece of new age horror, that changed the way ghost stories would be told in movies. While The Sixth Sense does hold up as a terrific movie, there are problems mostly with the direction of the story and the dialogue. It may please you to hear that Split has a lot of the same elements that made The Sixth Sense great, but also some of the faults. They are not the same movie at all, but M. Night Shyamalan may have stumbled upon his best idea since Unbreakable(2000) and while he has taken quite a fall in recent years, he still has the ability to create worlds that are interesting and watchable.
Split is about 3 teenage girls who after attending a birthday party, are abducted by a man who seems to have some significant mental problems. The girls are placed in a room who's only contents are 3 beds, a door and a bathroom. The girls can hear a few different voices on the other side of the door, even a woman who seems to be willing to help the girls, but as the girls find out, their captor has split personality disorder, and has been talking to himself the whole time. The plot is incredibly easy to understand, while also feeling like a complicated web of stories and characters that we will most likely never fully know about.
While Shyamalan has always been known for his twists at the end of his movies, his overall writing ability has been lacking. Where he really excels is in creating worlds that exist in the same one we live in, but adding an element that changes the whole story. For example The Sixth Sense is about a boy who is struggling to grow up, who also happens to see dead people. In Unbreakable Bruce Willis is a regular down on his luck guy looking for meaning in his life, who just happens to not be able to get hurt. Split follows the same formula and it is this which really took Split from a bad movie to a good one for me. The way the different personalities take hold of James McAvoy's character is just so darn cool and inventive. The more I learned about the process the more I wanted to see it used in other movies.
James McAvoy, who is probably best known for playing a young Professor X in the recent X-Men movies has been at this for a while. I first remember him as Mr. Tumnus in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) movie, but McAvoy has moved out of family movie actor and has become one who takes some challenging roles. McAvoy has played characters with mental disorders before, in Filth(2013) he played a cop with Bipolar Disorder and his performance in that was great. While he takes his role in Split a little over the top, its almost what the character needs, Kevin does not have a run of the mill case of split personality disorder, he has 23 unique personalities who seem to be completely separate people, to the point that one of them can have diabetes while the other 22 do not. While not his grandest performance, McAvoy gives a good one and one that fits into the movie.
I have tried to avoid using the wordplay that I'm sure every other review of this movie has used, but since were almost done I figure using this pun won't ruin your opinion of my opinion. I felt very SPLIT in my opinion of Split while watching it. On one hand there were some lines of dialogue that I could not believe made it past the first draft of the script, let alone into the final cut, but on the other Split kept my attention for most of the 117 minute run time. If you don't understand the ending that is fine, just do a quick internet search and the results should solve at least some of the confusion. Split is an entertaining movie, that was marketed more as a horror movie than a thriller, but if you keep an open mind and allow Split to be entertaining you should have a fun time at the movies.