McAvoy shines in flawed but thrilling Split

James McAvoy in Split. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

With Split, M. Night Shyamalan has created a terrific thriller rooted in elements of B-movie grit and grime that add a little verve otherwise missing from the man's repertoire. Shyamalan’s also created a film with a number of narrative flaws and a major problem with his female characters, neither of which is overly surprising given his previous efforts. It results in a mixed bag carried largely by the center performance by James McAvoy, who takes full advantage of the showcase role and captivates throughout. This movie at the very least proves how vital casting can be, and how a great performance can save a troubling film.

In a weird way, Shyamalan either nearly saves himself from himself or he nearly drowns himself. It depends on how you look at the man who directed and wrote this film and see if his talents as a director saved his poor writing skills or if his subpar writing skills undermined his directorial talents. Because the man is a pretty darn fine thriller director who takes Split's goofy premise – a man (McAvoy) with 23 distinct personalities kidnaps three students (Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson and Jessica Sula) as part of a sacrifice to a seemingly legendary 24th entity – and somehow creates an intense, discomfiting atmosphere in which even the daylight intimidates. The film is loaded with tight spaces, small corridors, confines falling apart and darkness barely interspersed with light that offer up an impeccable ambiance for oddity. He plays around with a few camera angles to offer a little insight into his characters' point of view at a given moment. His best little trick though is changing how he frames the various figures played by McAvoy when interacting with the abducted students and with his doctor (played by Betty Buckley). It adds a bit of nuance to the relationship McAvoy's personas have with the other people in his life.

That latter point is a sign of a good filmmaker, but it also compensates for his inability to accomplish the same goal as a writer. The writing in Split is remarkably sub-standard, beginning with the aforementioned premise that is too improbable to believe and never quite sticks despite the best efforts of Shyamalan's better half and the cast to sell it. There's also the dialog that lessens the further characters get into conversations, their chats riddled with those little bits of faux mysticism he likes to vomit into just about everything he does. A movie can't just be about a man with multiple personalities; it has to be about a mythic beast, or a character searching for some sort of potion through documentary filmmaking like in The Visit. Shyamalan tries too hard as a writer to force his films to sound important without conveying the natural oddity of the magical realism he's searching for. It doesn't help that he's a lazy writer to boot. One of the major character arcs of the film – the conversion by McAvoy's characters to the aforementioned 24th personality called The Beast – is rather similar to the one used by The Tooth Fairy in Manhunter and Red Dragon. His female characters are inconsistent, with one note portrayals – neither Richardson nor Sula get much to do beyond scream and moan – and astounding incompetence shown Buckley's doctor. Taylor-Joy's character, the prototypical final girl, gets the worst of it, with Shyamalan using past molestation and the resulting self harm as key driving points of her character and her chances at survival. This point can be viewed as the laziest bit of writing in this film and as an incredibly sexist characterization in a movie littered with such points.

Split’s saving grace is the bonkers and incredible performance put on by McAvoy. McAvoy loses himself to the characters within the characters he plays, from the scheming and evil Dennis to the goofy child Hedwig to the very in control Patricia. He makes them distinct beings – complete with inflection changes and individual tics – even as they begin to blur into one another toward the end, bouncing from one persona to the next in an internal battle for control. It's riveting to watch play out and immensely impressive to see the wild swings McAvoy undergoes in about a minute before his bad parts gain control and the momentary reprieve from the danger ends.

Review: Three out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 117 minutes

Genre: Thriller

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Target audience: Thriller fans who wanted something decent from M. Night Shyamalan.

Take the whole family?: I'm really impressed this thing somehow only garnered a PG-13 rating. Don't stray too far from that recommendation.

Theater or Netflix?: You can wait for it at home.

What happened to M. Night Shyamalan?: Aside from this film, which is the best thing he's done in years, what he's fallen into is the need to pull out tricks and stunts with many dashes of pretentiousness along with it. With Split he mostly grounds himself with tight corridors and grubbiness and gets a little dirty in the process. He's sort of like a less talented Terry Gilliam; both need constraints to hold back their worst impulses.

Watch this as well?: Psycho is the best bet for films featuring characters with dissociative identity disorder. Considering how much this film lifts from Manhunter, watch that and the still solid remake, Red Dragon. Unbreakable remains the best thing Shyamalan has directed, and is also one of the best superhero films of the past 20 years.

Bye Bye Man lacks scares, logic

Douglas Smith in The Bye Bye Man. Image courtesy STX Entertainment

Sometimes all a person can do is sit back and admire a movie as awesomely dumb as The Bye Bye Man, which at least proves even bad horror movies offer some entertainment value. Because, really, that's all this movie has going for it; any ambition to succeed as a piece of horror ends up unfulfilled from the title onward, left to better actors and more talented filmmakers.

Let's talk about that title for a second though. The title doubles as the name of the character haunting the three way-too old college students (played with little skill by Douglas Smith, Lucien Laviscount and Cressida Bonas) who move away from the dorms to a decrepit house in the woods. Astoundingly, multiple decision makers decided the phrase bye bye man was not only a good idea for the name of a supernatural entity – one whose name alone is enough to drive people into violent insanity, according to the script – but of the product being released for mass consumption. People are paid a lot of money to prevent movies from being titled The Bye Bye Man, and yet it now exists to linger in the dregs of horror moviedom, floating toward the bottom of the Netflix scroll for eternity.

So why call the villain Bye Bye Man anyway? Bye Bye Man never deigns to explain how the black-hooded being earned such a moniker or its origins in the first place. That's not a requirement for horror films to have, but for a movie that already pads its run time out with silly divergences and fattened scenes actually having a proper mystery for the characters to solve would offer a more organic and logical route for the script to take. The hunt the film does offer results in no helpful information to the characters, which is either a point toward the inherent existential futility of staving off death or poor writing. Occam's razor points toward the latter.

For the record, the movie doesn’t make the name work as an invocation for fear. It also doesn’t have the titular entity (played by Doug Jones) do anything either. Sure, the guy creeps around in a black hooded cloak and points at Smith's face in the cliché horror style, but his evil doesn't extend much beyond raising his fingers and staring ominously. The Bye Bye Man offers the deistic villain who sort of inspires bad things but is never shown actively participating in the bad things that arise in his wake. He and his poorly digitized hellhound are more like vultures than anything, giving the humans the hard work before they swoop in and pluck out a few eyeballs for show. The Bye Bye Man is sort of like Freddy Krueger, if Krueger lacked motivation, guile, ingenuity, charisma, and a sense of humor, among other attributes. His lack of involvement in the proceedings makes him less captivating as a nightmare figure. If you're going to show the evil, at least have it do something evil besides stalk unenthusiastically.

The one quasi-redeeming factor about The Bye Bye Man is how seriously the filmmakers, director Stacy Title and writer Jonathan Penner (who, per IMDB, are spouses) take the events depicted in this film. Little to no hilarity is intentional, and the actors follow along for the ride, aside from the screen consuming cameo by Faye Dunaway (although the other too good for this movie actress, Carrie-Anne Moss, plays it straight). It is the one saving grace to this very bad film, because Penner's dialog devolves into proper hilarity when the occasion arises. (One line in particular, involving a father comforting his daughter about the fate of her dead uncle, really needs to be seen on YouTube.) The film is loaded with many unnatural lines containing a lot of inane craziness delivered by people who are committed to this terrible experiment in horror that it at least offers a few chuckles to pass the time. Really, Penner's script might be the best worst part of Bye Bye Man, as the dude makes some really, really weird choices like having a young child attend a drunken college party and the entire scene involving Dunaway. The script doesn't reach bad-good status, but it is about as entertaining as Bye Bye Man gets.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 96 minutes

Genre: Horror

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Target audience: Horror fans and anyone looking to waste money.

Take the whole family?: This would still cause some problems for younger kids, but keeping it within three years of the PG-13 recommendation is fine.

Theater or Netflix?: Just avoid it.

Did this film ever stand a chance?: Not really given the early January release date. This is the dumping ground for bad movies, especially bad horror films, in which the studios hope a lack of better options can boost box office returns. This strategy has worked in the past – Paul Blart somehow made more than $100 million – but finding a decent film this time of year is like finding a pin in a pile of rotting fruit; it's in there somewhere, but the effort to find it just isn't worth it.

Watch this instead?: Nightmare on Elm Street greatly succeeds at everything Bye Bye Man flails at. Also always worth a watch are Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2, which do the creepy house thing better than Bye Bye Man.

Hidden Figures' interesting story lost to feel good tropes

Janelle Monae, Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer in Hidden Figures. Image courtesy 20th Century Fox.

I feel like a broken record when discussing films like Hidden Figures that take really great real-life stories and turn them into underwhelming feel good movies. There's always the potential for a terrific film right beneath the surface that gets mangled by sappy narrative choices that often add a hyper level of IMPORTANCE to the proceedings. The story is never considered strong enough by filmmakers to stand on its own; they have to add bits and pieces to the sides to create some monster designed to give viewers good vibes and a slight sense of onanistic superiority when compared with the jerks holding down the heroes on screen.

What is frustrating is the potential for what could be given the topic films like Hidden Figures covers. This film hits on the role African-American women played in developing America's space program in the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on the achievements of NASA mathematicians Katherine Johnson (played by Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe). The subject is fresh territory complete with fun information about space and featuring brilliant women whose contributions were minimized because of rampant racism and sexism. This is also the damning thing about movies like Hidden Figures: They are necessary to tell an unheard story to a broad audience and offer credit to people who have long deserved it. A documentary, though a much better route for conveying the information, simply would not garner the mass audience a fictionalized version starring Henson, Spencer and Monáe would.

Necessary does not directly result in a good film, no matter the subject matter and the stars (the aforementioned leads along with Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, Jim Parsons and Mahershala Ali) attached to it. Hidden Figures is hindered by the same mistakes other feel good movies sustain to cater to a mass audience. This movie is heavy handed with the lessons it wants to impart and the methods it does so, screaming its themes of equality and persistence to the high heavens and showing the racial inequality of Virginia circa 1961 in a finger-wagging, pedantic fashion. Characters in the film’s world speak less in dialogue and more in grand speeches, lecturing others (and, by extension, the audience) amid quotidian exchanges to, once again, prove some grand important point to people who already agree with it. The few moments when Katherine, Dorothy and Mary engage in some normal banter or get drunk on whiskey and dance around comes as more than a relief for the viewer than they should.

The underlying issue though is the exchange of historical importance for audience catharsis, as if the needs of the audience matters more than the story being told. Hidden Figures succumbs to this by inserting a few crowd pleasing moments in meant to make the film more palatable and far less honest to the story and era. Inserting a couple of fantastic falsities, for example Costner's composite character destroying a racial restroom sign, obfuscate the real tidbits like how John Glenn personally requested Katherine Johnson to double check key calculations before he went into orbit. The downside to melding fiction and fact is the fiction more often than not comes out on top, leaving the facts to drown.

At least Hidden Figures is a competent entry into the feel good genre. Henson and Spencer both excel at their respective roles and Monáe holds her own despite a squiffy southern accent; the aforementioned scenes when the three of them are shooting the breeze or trying to hook up Henson's Johnson with Ali's charming Col. Jim Johnson are rather sweet. And the film is at its best when it depicts the three working at NASA, whether by writing complex equations on a chalkboard or figuring out how a complex IBM machine works. It's rare for any film to show brilliance used in a logical and pragmatic fashion, so actually seeing the genius of these women applied is sort of fun to watch come to life. It's really difficult to not root for Hidden Figures to succeed because all of the elements for a very good to great movie are right there; it's the desire to use them to their full capacity that's missing.

Review: Three out of Five Stars 

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 127 minutes

Genre: Historical

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Target audience: Viewers looking for something historical that will make them feel better about themselves.

Take the whole family?: There's nothing overly violent or gratuitous about this one, but it won't be overly interesting to kids. Keep it to around age 8 if you want to use it as an intro to a history lesson.

Theater or Netflix?: Probably best to wait for this to stream to you.

Oscar odds?: It wouldn't be overly surprising if this landed as a Best Picture nominee – a couple of tracking sites have it either just in or on the cusp of the top 10 – and Octavia Spencer will probably get a well-deserved nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. The best shot at a win would be in Original Song, but it might still lose out to a tune from La La Land or Moana.

Watch this as well?: The Tuskegee Airmen is a hidden gem that highlights the contributions of the eponymous African-American pilots during World War II that is worth a watch if you can find it.