I came upon a quite heartening notion recently, that although not necessarily terribly profound has actually brightened my outlook considerably. Watching movies is always a bit of a gamble. A fantastic review does not always make for an enjoyable movie: I've lost track of the number of films I've loved that have the worst critical reception and vice versa. It's even more of a gamble now, what with having to sell various bodily fluids for tidy sums in dark corners of the city and the Internet just to afford a large popcorn and traditional oil drum of Coke. I don't like to gamble and I certainly don't like to lose; my epiphany was solely that with Anger in a Man Suit festering away on the blogosphere like some unlanced boil on the backside of movie reviewing, I can't lose. Every movie I watch is either going to entertain me enough that the voices go away for a bit or it's so astoundingly crap that it fuels my rage and winds up on here for a good old fashioned shoeing. I can literally no longer go wrong.
With all that in mind, I've had a bit of good run. Spiderman was awesome, Transformers was predictably gash, and then this week was touch and go for a while before a fine last minute comeback. Don't leave it in the hands of the judges folks, go for the finish.
M Night Shyamalan has had some rough old moments bless him. He's produced a couple of belters mind you, none more so than Sixth Sense which holds the weird distinction of being a phenomenonal movie the first time you watch it but suffers from the quickest example of the Law of Diminishing Returns in history. Literally by the end of the credits watching a second time is almost pointless and further viewings are barely even an inkling on the distant horizon. It is a great twist and pretty much anyone who says they called it on their first watch is probably a liar.
Unbreakable though, is his pinnacle for me. It's a relatively simple premise; if there were actual super heroes in the world, how would that be likely to go down? It's a dark little thriller and for Shyamalan it has an understated twist which might be a touch more predictable than Sixth Sense but ultimately is more satisfying. Everything else he's directed feels a bit like grasping at straws and clumsy foreshadowing. Signs for example is purely an exercise in putting weird things into the script purely so the final act works. The weird kid hangs garlic in the shed while their uncle was dishonourably discharged from the Army because he can only see colours when he smells Italian food only for a chameleonic otherworldly creature to reside under their house but who can be seen by the uncle when he sits in the shed... well it's obvious from that point isn't it? Except there is no monster it was Old Man Withers all along. Pesky kids. The Village was super predictable and really annoying because the whole point was that there were no real monsters and Goddammit I wanted a real monster. Instead we get a clique of rich idiots with no coping or parenting skills who would literally rather watch their offspring die than admit that artificially manufacturing the past in a wood somewhere is A Dumb Idea. Apart from anything, if you're that damn wealthy, hire people to be the monsters rather than engage in unnecessary subterfuge. Shyamalan's downfall has always been his desperate struggle to recapture that feeling; The Twist. His best work I think, is when he isn't trying. Except The Last Airbender. I watched five minutes of that and the acting was so shocking it literally (figuratively) gave me gall stones. Best to not mention that again really.
So you'll forgive me for being a touch sceptical about Split. Lord knows mental health issues take a bit of a bashing in Hollywood scripts because your average scriptwriter doesn't really understand how psychopathy, schizophrenia or multiple personality disorders actually work. Not that I do either, but I'm not being paid to write movies; how hard can it be to research that sort of thing and make it believable? As it stands James McAvoy is 23 distinctly different people and it's fair to say some of them are less than pleasant. Suffice to say the whole premise hangs on his performance and frankly he does a bang up job. In the 90s they might have got Jim Carrey to gurn his way through things, but there's a lot more subtlety at work here and actually, a hearty round of handshakes to all involved. It's a pretty simple plot, nutjob kidnaps teenage hotties, personalities engage in a power struggle, girls try to escape, and then a wild Twist appears. It was super effective and caused confusion. Well, actually not so much that last part, the main twist worked really well; I can't help feeling a little disappointed that there wasn't an actual monster again, but it made sense, was a little bit surprising and ended the film nicely. Or did it?
Foolish mortals, did you think there was but one twist? Ha! M Night scoffs at you from atop his magical tower. I assume he lives in a magical tower, he seems the sort.
In honesty, I was never planning to watch this movie until I was talking to my friend about it and he told me the real twist. If you haven't seen it, look away now. Seriously.
It's a sequel. Split is a goddamned sequel. To Unbreakable.
Hats off, because even knowing that throughout the movie I still leapt out of my seat at the end when ol' Bruce Willis pops up in a two second cameo and says "Mr. Glass?". Genius, I exclaimed. Huzzah and other 19th century proclamations. Nothing in the preceding hour and a half gives the game away and all of a sudden, one of my favourite movies has it's own cinematic universe and you know what? What was a fairly entertaining thriller suddenly jumped up to easily my second favourite Shyamalan film. What can I say? I'm nothing if not magnanimous.
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