An Overrated Mess

Rating: 2/10 (27 March 2017)

Mr. Night Shyamalan is either a visitor from another planet or a Terminator-esque cybernetic organism. For two decades his movies have attempted to impersonate the films of true humans, but they are oddly written imperfect interpretations because his brain chemistry is radically different from our own.
Not a single spoken line in "Split" is something that a human being would ever actually say. The screenplay is a hair-tearing mind-boggling mess. Confusion gives way to anger and then utter madness as characters spew increasingly bonkers dialog and behave impossibly stupid. And then the film continues for another 100 minutes.
The direction, editing, and cinematography are all nearly as insane. When the film isn't lingering 12 seconds too long on panning camera shot after panning camera shot it's frenetically jumping back and forth between characters and story lines, halting all momentum and throwing pacing and tension out the window every time.
Split was sold on the performance of Mr. James McAvoy as 24 different roles and judging by the box office and the high ratings the hype seems to have worked. He is indeed the high point of the film and the reason for the second star in this rating but compared to the hype he's slightly underwhelming - McAvoy spends the majority of the running time as just 3 or 4 characters, effectively making the whole 24 personalities thing purely a marketing tactic.
The acting by the remainder of the cast is awful across the board. Anya Taylor-Joy manages to come out the least scathed by simply staring blankly into the middle distance for the entirety of the film, but her two fellow kidnappees are laughably horrendous. Betty Buckley flounders helplessly through her lines and while she's universally terrible it's difficult to know whether to blame her or the batsh*t directing and writing as she's expected to deliver some of the worst dialog ever put on screen.
By the end the whole affair devolves into a hilarious dumpster fire the likes of which we've seen in "The Happening" but by then it's far too late to find any sort of enjoyment in the spectacle. I can't recommend this to anyone.
Mr. Night, please return to your home planet. We're all very tired.