Split 2017

I wrote a favorable review this year of M. Night Shymalan's unpopular The Happening. I think its the most creative, topical and pleasing of the work I've seen. Split is a throwback to his earlier films - very Hollywood checklist, very moody and self-serious. It has moments of awkward humor and deep social commentary but its all stifled by the industrial, commercial nature of the story. What starts as a very creepy, reflective portrait of the sick Jungian archetypes of modern American structuralism drizzles into a lazy deconstruction with cop-out answers about trauma that were only clever in the 1950s when Hitchcock made them originally. The presentation isn't interesting enough and it all feels cheapened as it climaxes with an "Avengers" cliffhanger ending. Yes, this was all an origin/prequel/commercial for Unbreakable 2. That explains the boring execution and lack of inspired ideas as Shymalan is out to please "demographics" with superpowers, a "sexy psycho" Heath Ledger antagonist, child/sexual abuse subplots and impossibly brilliant teenage victims who are too often visually sexualized (not a good look when the film is about sexual victimhood).

Maybe its all a brave pervy confessional of its director with the psychoanalytic nature of the plot and this obvious hypocrisy of fetishizing adolescent white girls, a running theme in Shymalan's work. He blames his mom like every director ever - like Aronofsky's mother! this year- and delivers a bland Saw rip-off off that easy critic-bait. I found the film disturbing for the right and wrong reasons. This was like the 10th film this year to make softcore porn out of child-looking actresses and it seems like a male generational confirmation and/or a sexist self-pitying protest. Its gross, to me. Why not just show hot women and get over this disgusting Lolita fetish? Why keep drilling these nasty dark impulses into commercial films? That doesn't make it art. Elite Hollywood pedo lifestyle propaganda dressed as softcore S&M popcorn entertainment for teens. And this weirdness goes all the way back to 80s horror slashers and beyond.

Anyway, the film was too long, too slow and didn't pay off much of anything but shows another, more unlikable but vulnerable side of M. Night Shymalan who must be having a bad midlife crisis and dip in his bank account.