Great premise that unraveled throughout

Rating: 6/10 (27 April 2017)

I had high hopes for this movie, but it really fell apart in the end. Possible spoilers.
The best thing about Split was James McAvoy. He played his character(s) impeccably. His mannerisms changed in almost imperceptible ways, so you could always see what personality was in control. Because of him, it's not a bad movie.
The plot wasn't half bad. The suspense worked. The issue was it kept reaching points where the conflict in the film should have resolved, but it continued to play out until it became ridiculous.
There are characters who die who did not need to die for a good story. They died at the wrong time for it to make sense. There was no satisfactory resolution, and there could have been. What ended up happening was several people died for shock value, without adding value to the story. And the shock value wasn't high enough because by that point the story was devolving into no longer being believable.
There were also some really weird scenes where the teenage characters were sexualised for no particular reason. They spent half the movie in their underwear without much of an explanation in the plot.
There were lots of well executed parts, for sure, and it's far from a terrible movie. But when a movie makes you think "okay, this should end in five minutes" multiple times while just getting more pointlessly dark, and finally doesn't pay off the audience's expectations of more than one of the cast surviving, and doesn't even give half a happy ending to the remaining characters, it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
Sure it's horror, so that's how it should be expected to play out, but they set up what seemed like rich characters that might grow and learn, and abandoned the most intelligent aspects of the film in the resolution.