I, like everyone who watched split thought it was ok I guess, some people were blown away by James Mcavoy’s drama schoolkid impressionfest, I just thought it was lame and silly. I never really had my belief suspended, I never found him creepy or felt like he was becoming different people. I just saw silly James Mcavoy doing a bunch of silly voices and faces and it felt dumb and forced.

And he does a lot more of that in this movie and it seems to be the focus since the other characters are in a coma at least one is pretending to be in a coma. I watched this and the death wish remake with my brother and for those that haven’t seen it, the death wish remake is probably the most phoned in performance from Bruce Willis in recent memory. And when this movie started I asked him ‘do you think his performance will be less or more phoned in for this movie?’ and understandably he said less because it’s not a remake it’s a sequel to one of his best movies, arguably.

Oh how wrong he was. I mean it’s weird to harp on the performances of a movie as dumb as this, but it’s just the thing that pops out at me the most, and it’s not just Bruce Willis, they’re all terrible, it’s like no one but the kid who played his son in the original movie took this seriously.

Because you have Bruce Willis who literally spends most of the movie sitting down who just looks like he wants to take his check and go home, he does so little in this movie and he’s supposed to be the hero, I wondered if they just had him for the day. You have Mcavoy doing his silly impressions which got old in split and you have Samuel L Jackson doing his half hearted mastermind bit. But for the most of the movie he’s just pretending he’s in a coma. So essentially two of the main characters are old guys who are getting paid to sit down a lot.

And then you have Sarah Paulson being Sarah Paulson. She has no acting range whatsoever, she plays the same fucking character in everything. I know this from watching every season of american horror story, where she plays multiple different characters sometimes in the same season. She must have played like ten or so different characters in American horror story and they’re all the same, pathetic whiney people or smug whiney people. All she can do is sad or smug with an air of unearned authority, and that’s what she brings to this.

I really think it would have been a much stronger movie if it took her character and had a real movie actress play that role and make her the centre of the movie. Like she’s a psychiatrist hired to debunk superheroes but then the more she learns about them, the more she begins to believe. It could’ve been like a weird superhero version of silence of the lambs. But no, the movie just spends so much time dicking around with these pointless characters.

I had this movie spoiled for me so I knew it had no range and probably no budget because there’s a cool sequence at the start not the very start because that’s dumb as shit. Where Willis as a superhero is taking on the massive evil of white kids punching old asian people for viral video purposes, we really needed a superhero for that, it’s not like the police could’ve done something about that. There’s no way the police could’ve just watched their videos and then Willis could just tell them where they live. It’s like superman decides to beat the shit out of someone for speeding or spitting on the sidewalk.
I mean in the first movie he takes on a serial killer kidnapper and a terrorist but in this he’s stopping violent pranksters from going viral gee wizz. And they make a salt bae joke just to date the movie, salt bae is a meme that’s old now, people reading this now will have no idea what that meme is about because its just about a guy who salts beef in a weird way.

Why put that in your movie? Why put yourself in your movie? Every M. Night movie he makes a weird awkward pointless cameo. When Hitchcock did this it was very minor, in some cases other films would put a cut out of him in the background as a silhouette. I’m not sure he had speaking parts. But this was a guy who was very engaged with his audience, the trailer to Psycho is just him talking about it on the set and people went to watch it based on that. It was Alfred Fucking Hitchcock, M. Night is no Hitchcock and no one thinks it’s clever or funny to see him appear in his own movies, it’s just weird and sad.

Yeah so he has this weird pointless cameos where maybe three people would be ‘oh he’s playing the same character as he did in unbreakable – a movie that came out almost twenty fucking years ago!’

The ego on this guy, I can barely fathom it. I have to imagine the impetus to the movie being like him sitting and watching the marvel movies and their success with the cinematic universe and being like “I can do that.”

No, no you can’t please stop.

My brother was psyched when he saw the after credit like twist bit at the end of Split where it was in the same universe as unbreakable, I groaned and now he knows why.

Because he was thinking that this was something twenty years in the making and it would be totally epic, packed with awesome ideas, culminating in this amazing completion of the franchise.

I looked at it and saw a guy thinking he could get in on that sweet cinematic universe money like a fucking scammer by dredging up twenty year old characters like dusty Halloween skeletons. So where he saw pragmatism and culmination of twenty years of ideas I saw the true raw cynicism of this movie. All his movies are pg-13’s or 12A if you’re like me and have the misfortune of being in the UK. So Split, a horror movie about a serial killer multiple personality person is made in a way that children can watch it. I looked it up and I think all his movies are pg-13’s. This isn’t a style thing, this is a fucking marketing strategy, he sacrifices tone and any artistic integrity to mass market all his films. It’s like reverse sleaze, he makes his movies wholesome to make as much money possible. It’s smart but also I’m watching a movie where a guy is strong enough to rip people in half and you can’t show any blood or murder at all. Like what’s the point?

As I said I watched the red letter media review of this so I already knew what happened in the movie, I don’t care about it being spoiled because I didn’t care and you shouldn’t care about spoilers either because you’ve either seen it or you shouldn’t bother. And to be fair if you’ve seen the trailer you’ve see the whole movie anyway.

But the most frustrating thing about this movie is it could’ve been ok, to get back to the point I was trying to make earlier, it starts off pretty fun. You have a set up where Willis is a superhero vigilante who stops pranksters for some reason and doesn’t wear a mask in the age of smart phones and is then surprised when he gets caught.

He and the beast have a cool fight at the start and you can be forgiven for thinking this is cool to see the beast square off against Willis, and it really should’ve been the movie. Willis tracking down the Beast and then an epic showdown.

But no, what happens instead is they get captured and for some reason taken to the place Jackson’s character has been held for twenty years to be convinced they’re not actually super heroes by Sarah Paulson in these really boring therapy sessions.

That’s when you realise this movie isn’t leaving this one building. So you have this guy trying to do a little marvel universe but he doesn’t want to spend marvel money or the effort that goes into that type of movie. So his epic conclusion literally takes place in the parking lot of this one building the whole movie is shot in.

Literally half the movie is set up. It actually starts around the one hour mark and at that point I was actually sort of enjoying it. Because what you expect from this movie is that the previous two movies handle the set up and this movie can be just one long pay off, one epic third act. But no it takes a really long boring hour of people talking and the pointless side characters from the other movies coming back to do basically nothing. Like Willis’ son from the first movie comes back and it’s the same actor and his whole point in the movie is that he googles Kevin (splitguy). The girl from split does the hulk thing of calming the beast so he can be murdered and Jackson’s mother doesn’t do anything except wear terrible ageing makeup because it’s the same actress from unbreakable and she’s actually younger than Jackson.

After they’re captured nothing happens for the first hour. Bruce Willis is sitting down for ninety percent of this movie, he basically does nothing in a movie that should be about him and then he dies in a puddle. I’m not kidding.

He’s fighting the beast and then this super secret organisation that for some reason meets in restaurants and just waits for people that aren’t in the organisation to leave so they can talk about their plans. Apparently the wait staff in the restaurants are in the secret organisation too because they heard everything. So they show up like at the end of the movie and they just shoot the beast when he’s distracted by budget Alita Battle angel. Jackson is killed by the beast and the Bruce Willis is just drowned in a puddle.

My brother was like ‘this is when he fights back and beats all their asses’ and I knew what would happen so I just shook my head as they just dragged this old tired man who just wanted to sit down and get a check so he could buy booze and go home over a puddle and then drown him as he doesn’t even attempt to fight back.

The whole time I was watching this I was thinking ‘this is what M. Night deserves for making this movie’.

So they all die and the twist is there’s a secret group that kills superheroes for the sake of balance but then the peripheral characters from the other movies get together to expose super heroes to the world. Because Mr Glass’ real master plan was to die and expose the world to superheroes. Which is just dumb because we only find out they’re being suppressed at the end. The secret organisation plot line could’ve been good if M. Night wasn’t such a crack addict for twists and actually established their existence at the start of the movie. Because during the entire course of the movie there’s no threat. All you’re expecting is Splitguy to escape and do some splitguy stuff, but if you established this organisation from the start and didn’t hold it back as a twist like a retard it could’ve been a decent plot point not just seem like something you pulled out of your ass to ruin your movie.

Oh also double twist, Kevin’s (splitguy) dad was on the same train as Willis in the first movie so that train crash created both the Beast and Willis. Oooohh OMG Wow much epic such twist, it’s not like you totally just pulled that out of your ass. No this was the plan all along and it’s just genius and it comes full circle, such wow much genius.

It’s not even clever, it’s just bleh. I just didn’t care, there’s so much about this movie that’s just like ‘so what’. Like how long it takes to try and convince us that them being superheroes is all in their minds when we don’t care. We just want something to happen. I just sat there watching people sitting down talking about stuff I didn’t care about expecting a film to happen and it never did.

A weird shirtless sperg and an old man sort of had an uncomfortable wrestle in a parking lot and then they were killed. It’s less like a movie plot and more like a headline in a florida newspaper.

I mean the problem with this movie of which there are many is it has some decent ideas but they’re just so badly handled it’s not even funny. This movie isn’t so bad it’s good, it’s just shit.

And don’t look at this as a twenty year build up to this. This is just a bunch of people who are so desperate for attention and money they’re willing to dig up a movie that was pretty good just to suck the marrow from it’s bones for a sequel. It’s sad. People don’t think you can retroactively ruin movies but you really can, I’m sorry. A shitty movie doesn’t hurt a good book but a shitty sequel makes the previous movies look like shit. They don’t look better in comparison, especially if it’s made by all the same people like this. It just makes that good movie look like a fluke, or it makes you feel stupid for liking it in the first place.

With the star wars movies you can kind of say “well George Lucas had nothing to do with these movie” yeah but he did the prequels and they were panned, I didn’t think they were that bad and compared to last jedi and force awakens they’re masterpieces. But it doesn’t change the fact that there are officially more bad star wars movies/games/tv shows than good now. The franchise soured, the cow was milked so hard it started squirting blood.

So yeah that’s that, I knew it was going to be bad but I had to see it to know just how bad and I did and it was, please don’t watch it or do, who cares?