Movie Review: Split
After a slump of some pretty disappointing movies, the last couple of movies M. Night Shyamalan have been pretty solid. With Split, I feel that Shyamalan is back at the top of his game, his best movie since Signs. The movie starts out with three teenaged girls being abducted at the King Of Prussia mall parking lot, a fun scene for me since I’ve parked at that same parking lot about a hundred times. Kevin, the abductor, is a man with 23 different personas. Some of them are fairly harmless, but the personas hint at a hidden personality, the beast, who is somehow beyond human.
The movie was by and large terrific. I had one complaint about the movie, and that was that early on the three girls had ample opportunity to rush him and make an escape, one that would most likely have been successful, but they never did. It wasn’t terribly realistic, and it was basically a plot device so that the story could play out revealing all of Kevin’s many personalities. Everything else about the movie was top notch. Pretty much every movie I’ve ever watched that involves associative disorder has been terrible prior to this. Shyamalan clearly did extensive research and was faithful to what is known about associative disorder, which was pretty impressive considering he added a supernatural component to it. He did a masterful job of maintaining tension throughout. James McAvoy, who played Kevin, did an amazing acting job. I could tell which of Kevin’s personas he was using before he even spoke just by his mannerisms and body language. It was a performance worthy of an Oscar win, but of course the Hollywood foreign press won’t give him a sniff of an Oscar, since they crap all over horror movies, and will instead give nominations to Leonardo Dicaprio, George Clooney, or Ben Affleck for another lousy performance in another one of their mediocre movies, but I digress. The ending delivered, and I especially enjoyed the final scene of the movie, which hints at a sequel with a tie in to another Shyamalan movie.
The movie was by and large terrific. I had one complaint about the movie, and that was that early on the three girls had ample opportunity to rush him and make an escape, one that would most likely have been successful, but they never did. It wasn’t terribly realistic, and it was basically a plot device so that the story could play out revealing all of Kevin’s many personalities. Everything else about the movie was top notch. Pretty much every movie I’ve ever watched that involves associative disorder has been terrible prior to this. Shyamalan clearly did extensive research and was faithful to what is known about associative disorder, which was pretty impressive considering he added a supernatural component to it. He did a masterful job of maintaining tension throughout. James McAvoy, who played Kevin, did an amazing acting job. I could tell which of Kevin’s personas he was using before he even spoke just by his mannerisms and body language. It was a performance worthy of an Oscar win, but of course the Hollywood foreign press won’t give him a sniff of an Oscar, since they crap all over horror movies, and will instead give nominations to Leonardo Dicaprio, George Clooney, or Ben Affleck for another lousy performance in another one of their mediocre movies, but I digress. The ending delivered, and I especially enjoyed the final scene of the movie, which hints at a sequel with a tie in to another Shyamalan movie.
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