Two hours and nine minutes that I'll never get back.

Rating: 4/10 (7 May 2019)

It's really my own fault that I gave this a chance. I watched "Unbreakable" in theaters years ago and hadn't revisited it until this year. It held up. In fact, it's almost the best in a long chain of mostly terrible M. Night Shyamalan movies, second only to "The Sixth Sense." I thought "Unbreakable" was original and fun and exciting, but it was 19 years ago. Then "Split" came along, and it wasn't terrible in my opinion. It was far fetched and silly but McAvoy's acting was entertaining enough to carry the movie, though the ending was very silly and took away from the rest of the film. We've all been conditioned to expect a twist at the end of these movies, and I truly wasn't expecting "Split" to reveal that it was in the same universe as "Unbreakable." It was genuinely surprising, though still very silly. So I figured, "okay I need to finish this trilogy to at least see the outcome." I don't know if I've ever seen a movie that expected less of the audience. I truly felt like the film maker thought I was stupid, that's how heavy handed and miserable this movie was to me. There were so many instances in which I couldn't even believe the dialogue written for these characters. Half of the lines spoken had my head in my palm from the physical pain from cringing so hard. The plot line barely makes sense. The "twist" is something so obvious that I thought it was just a plot point the audience was supposed to already know. James McAvoy changes personalities so frequently at some points that it plays like the hilarious scene in "The Mask" in which Jim Carrey is playfully shot and accepts the academy award. Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis really phoned this one in, and I would believe they shot all of their scenes in one afternoon just after eating a hot sandwich and warm glass of milk. Even the "Easter eggs" are thrown in your face. You can't watch the movie without catching the ham fisted allusions to Marvel and DC in newspaper headlines, or Shyamalan's ridiculous cameo. All in all, I love bad D class movies, but this wasn't even "so bad it's good." It was just terrible.
PS - They felt it necessary to include three shots of James McAvoy (The Beast) running across a lawn on all fours like a rhino, but it only served to slow his running pace and look absolutely ridiculous. I mean, my mouth was agape at that point. What were they thinking?