An epic tale is overruled
whispering sexist insults, we cut from Mary behaving heroically to a pox-ridden
Elizabeth tearily embroidering flowers and pining for a baby. To make the Scottish queen the heroine, it seems they felt they had to turn the English queen into a simpering dolt. As the real Elizabeth held on to the throne for 45 years and fought off the Spanish Armada, this feels unfair. More importantly, it doesn’t work dramatically. Elizabeth, one of the most charismatic rulers in English history, is a pushover.
The only genuinely cinematic moments are the brutal killing of a cross-dressing musician and a badly-staged battle on the banks of a Scottish river. The Babington plot, Mary’s gruesome beheading and Little Willie’s dance of deception don’t feature at all.
The two “royals” who look certain to triumph at this year’s Oscars are Olivia Colman’s Anne and Rami Malek’s Freddie Mercury.
THE SIXTH Sense earned writer/ director M Night Shyamalan a reputation as Hollywood’s Mr Twist but we had a long wait for the big reveal in his 2016 comeback, Split. In the final seconds, this pulpy horror about a kidnapper with multiple personalities (James McAvoy) unmasked itself as a sort of spin-off from Unbreakable, Shyamalan’s arty 2000 drama where Bruce Willis’s train crash survivor became a super-powered vigilante.
It was a gasp-inducing scene that seemed to reference the franchise building of Marvel and DC Comics. But as it came from a director who had spent the past decade in the cinematic wilderness, it posed a big question: did anyone actually want a Shyamalan Cinematic Universe?
The director gets rather over-confident in
a preposterous thriller that further unites the characters. After a reasonably action-packed opening, it slows to a crawl as we are locked up in an asylum with Willis’s David Dunn, McAvoy’s troubled Kevin and Samuel L Jackson’s Mr Glass, the brittleboned supervillain from Unbreakable.
As we’ve just been reintroduced to Kevin’s 24th personality, a super-strong, wallclimbing cannibal, The Beast, it is odd that security at supermax hospital Raven Hill Memorial seems to be the responsibility of two weedy, unarmed orderlies who abandon their stations to chat about health food.
Dr Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), a psychiatrist who specialises in superhero delusion (apparently that’s a thing), tries to convince her inmates that they are normal human beings in long discussions where they are tethered to lightweight office chairs.
Before we get to the inevitable breakout, we have to endure Shyamalan elaborating his overblown mythology in clunky dialogue and McAvoy’s increasingly tedious one-man show. The big twist isn’t worth the wait.
“There are moments that I look at him, this kid that I raised, who I thought I knew inside and out, and I wonder who he is,” David Sheff (Steve Carell) says at the beginning of
David is talking about his eldest son Nic (Timothée Chalamet), a good-looking teenager who has been accepted at every university he has applied for. Despite being a heroically great father, David feels powerless to stop his son from destroying his life after becoming hopelessly addicted to crystal meth.
Why Nic has turned to drugs is the film’s central mystery. We are never given an answer, making the film both refreshingly honest and slightly frustrating.
Instead, Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen focuses on the psychological impact of his addiction on the family. When David watches his daughter perform in a school play, his mind is clearly elsewhere. Flashbacks show Nic enjoyed a very close relationship with his father but his siblings will have very different memories.
This true story can be a hard watch but Carell and Chalamet have never been better.
Glass, Beautiful Boy.