Initially I had a lot of reservations about seeing this film. The reviews weren't impressive, and they also did that thing where they give away the biggest shock value of the plot line during the trailer (McAvoy's character's multiple personalities), which I find extremely annoying. But ANYWAYS.... after some coaxing of friends and a much needed pay day, I decided to bite the bullet and go see M. Night Shyamalan's, Split.
The movie itself had so many great aspects that it took a second for me to really be able to sit down and digest it to comb through what I liked and disliked. For starters, the casting was flawless. Instead of picking huge Hollywood names, there was a lot of new and fresh faces that we saw. While not every performance was Oscar worthy, it was refreshing to breathe some fresh life into the movie industry.
That being said, I think we can all stop for a second and give James McAvoy a HUGE round of applause. As we can tell from the trailer, he plays a character who has been diagnosed with 23 personalities who then kidnaps three girls. My main concern was how any one actor could tap into that type of character who is actually 23 characters wrapped up in one body? McAvoy managed to develop a true sense of each personality so much so that when he switched from one to another or in terms that the film uses, "brought a personality to the light," his entire body of mannerisms - all the way down to micro-expresions - changed.
Onto our assumed protagonists (the three kidnapped females) the way that they were portrayed I eventually came to appreciate. Initially I was annoyed because <<spoiler>> one ends up in a bra and the other ends up in her underwear. At first, this was frustrating because I initially was annoyed at the immediate sexualization of the female characters. But you then come to learn, that the reasoning behind why they had to remove their clothes had nothing to do with them being sexualized. Instead it had to do with the fact that one of the personalities had OCD and couldn't handle any sort of filth or dirt on their clothing. So I calmed down about that momentarily. <<end of spoiler>> While we're at it, there wasn't a whole lot of diversity either, but I'll just go sip my tea over here......You'll be happy to know that none of them do anything monumentally idiotic that will have you ready to yell at the screen, they catch on to what's going on fairly quickly, and then devise plans of escape. This was refreshing compared to the typical "kidnapped girl does the dumbest thing possible to try and escape and ends up dead or keeps doing stupid stuff until finally you end up her dead anyways" scenario we are usually presented with in thriller/horror movies.
Interestingly enough, the film makes you sympathize with McAvoy's character because deep down, he is an antagonist with protagonist intentions. Overall I thought it was a well done movie. While I understand many of the criticisms of it in terms of how mental illness is portrayed, when taken at face value the depth of the film is never ending.
<<SPOILER ALERT AHEAD>>
There were many difficult aspects however. The film had points where it was very 'on the nose.' The first girl's initial attempt at escape, you automatically know she'll be caught; when the therapist comes to see him you literally see her get out of the cab and immediately are like, "Yep, Dr. Fletcher, this is where you die." When the only thing that saves Casey is the fact that she's extremely screwed up and has scars that have finally revealed themselves, so he just walks away. Literally just peaces right out. While I can appreciate the depth of the scene it still was like, okay yeah duh of course that's what kept her alive.
Outside of those, some of the best scenes involved watching McAvoy transform from one personality to another. He truly displayed his acting chops with this one (favorite scene was 100% when Dr. Fletcher is trying to get Dennis to admit that he is in fact Dennis and not Barry when Dennis finally allows himself to fully come to light with her, just wow).
The cameo at the very end with Bruce Willis however was the show stopping point. He connects the Unbreakable storyline with Split insinuating he might be making another film to further connect the two. Rumors have spread that Shyamalan will be releasing an Unbreakable 2 that keeps with the continuity of Split, but we'll all have to wait and see.
