Smudged Glass
Tedious, tiresome sum up this 14-year-old’s mindset
With a passing glance, it might seem a fortuitous pairing to have M. Night Shyamalan direct, what is, in effect, a “superhero” movie. After all, his films have always skirted with a pulpy, simplistic fantasia, resonate of many Golden Age comics. But whereas early issues of the Hulk, or the Fantastic Four follow only an adolescent’s version of plotting (and I should know, once being one of those very kids, utterly enraptured with Stan Lee’s shambling narrative logic), Shyamalan’s films have the pomposity to suppose they are something more significant.
In a way, I can appreciate Shyamalan’s journey, from total unknown, to being dubbed the “new Spielberg” — an appellation, it must be said, he never called for — to having his career crash and burn with one cratering project after another, before he made
Split, a passable film about a serial killer with multiple personality disorder. I have nothing personally against him — a Philly boy, he reps the city tirelessly in his movies, and, for the love of God, he’s even a huge Sixers fan — but his artistic vision has always been rooted in a dopey, 14-year-old sort of sensibility.
At the base of his films is an awkward inability to conceptualize how human beings function in the world. No one seems to have a job that makes sense, dialogue is stilted and endlessly expository, plotting is clumsy, staging
● is worse. This film, which he calls the culmination of 19 years work, marks a confluence of his worst attributes.
The film begins with Sybil-like multiple murderer Kevin (James McAvoy), who has somehow managed to chain up four more young women — a group of cheerleaders, no less — in an abandoned factory somewhere in the city. On the case is the aging David Dunn (Bruce Willis), now a phantom-like hero dubbed “The Overseer” (yes, a name only Shyamalan would think of as edgy), who roams the city at night in a green poncho, raining justice on petty thieves, and criminals, and returning to his now-grown son, Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark), who helps his dad’s crusade with logistical support and stern warnings about getting himself caught.
Dunn tracks down Kevin, frees the women, and a battle between him and the Kevin personality known as The Beast, a feral sort with superhuman strength and fury, who tends to do much of the killing and maiming. Fighting to a near standstill, the pair are apprehended by the police and inexplicably taken to a psychiatric ward, which features a fledgling program led by Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), a specialist in treating a particular mental disorder: the one where normal people think they have superpowers.
Under what can only be called shockingly minimal security (two orderlies, neither terribly sharp, metal doors, and no police presence of any kind), Dr. Staple holds group sessions with the men, along with the other inhabitant of this wing, Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson), the former fragile mastermind now doped up to his gills to keep him from … thinking too hard. In these sessions, Dr. Staple works diligently trying to convince them of their inherent normalcy, utilizing bizarrely idiotic “scientific” explanations for their feats (how did The Beast bend solid metal bars in front of his captives? Why, because the iron was obviously old, and in an unusually humid environment! How does he scale sheer walls? He watched a lot of rock-climbing videos!).
Meanwhile, various side characters, including the lone surviving young woman from Split, (Anya Taylor-Joy), loosely flit about in the background, enacting plot points and little else, en route to the film’s strange kind of anti-climax.
Shyamalan has a talent for obfuscating his lack of credible writing by hiding it behind the scrims and shanties of plot derivation: The Sixth Sense, his magnum opus, was saved by making the horribly wooden dialogue between the protagonist and his wife purposefully so (she couldn’t actually hear him). Here, too, Shyamalan offers up what can only be assumed is one of the worst and most ineffectual psychologists ever to earn a degree, only to plot-twist his way out of trouble by the end.
In truth, the scenes with Dr. Staple conversing with her patients are excruciating precisely because we know beyond the shadow of doubt that their powers are real. Had Shyamalan managed to convince his audience to question what they saw, there might well have been a sweet payoff (a la Neo’s realization in The Matrix), but, because Dr. Staple seems so idiotic, and her explanations so feeble, it merely wastes our time.
Very little of it holds up against even minimal rational inspection — a known serial killer, dangerous beyond measure, is spared a trial of any kind, and kept largely unsupervised (and unbound) as he interacts with not just orderlies and doctors, but young women as well — and, by the end, whatever resonance Mr. Shyamalan was hoping for is lost amid a rising tide of endless denouement (indeed, it could be said the film is about 80 percent comprised of tedious setup, and tiresome finish).
Having McAvoy front and center, more or less saved Split from being utterly unwatchable. Here — sharing the screen with a somnambulant Willis and coasting Jackson — there is only so much he can do. Like a basketball coach with one outstanding player, Shyamalan seems to realize his film completely depends on McAvoy’s eerie talent, so much so, he gives him spotlight after spotlight — much of which, while fascinating to watch, doesn’t do very much to further the story or our understanding of what’s going on.
If this is indeed the beginning of a Shyamalan Cinematic Universe, God help us all.