SPLIT

SPLIT the new  M. Night Shyamalan movie starring James McAvoy is what you might imagine if Hannibal Lecter hooked up with Sybil and they had a love child. 

Of course, that would be after Sally Fields was the Flying Nun and before she was old enough to be Spiderman's Aunt Meg. Anyway, Kevin Wendell Crumb, the villain, has a lot on his mind: twenty-three to twenty-six different personalities sharing his body like it's a rent controlled tenement building. It's hard to keep up with the total number of personalities. Doesn't matter because we only get to see like eight if I remember correctly with four of the personalities dominating the screen time: Dennis, Patricia, Hedwig, and the Beast. Oh, did you catch the cleverness of Kevin's last name--Crumb. You know, like a broken cookie. Yeah, that kind sums up the movie for me. 

Kevin, as Dennis, kidnaps three teenage girls--one blond leader fembot, one not-so-bright-hotttie black chick, and an angst filled-brunette chick with a dark secret, and holds them hostage in the bowels of the Philadelphia zoo. Do we care? Not really because we never learn enough to care about them. Really, nobody cares. Same thing for Kevin Crumb. I couldn't care less about any of them.

And why the zoo? Because the Beast--get it? 

So Dennis borrows this plan which is part Kiss the Girls and Silence of the Lambs and the story unfolds. This is where I begin to yawn. We're soon introduced to Kevin's psychiatrist (the female version of Bruce Willis' character in The Sixth Sense) who we can forget about because she's just a plot device used to data dump background info on Kevin. It's about as interesting as reading the back of a cereal box, but learn Kevin has issues in case the movie title and trailers threw you off. 

And, that's pretty much the movie. Now, in the last, say, fifteen minutes or so, the Beast shows up, a couple of the girls have a bad day, and the predictable ending--except for the cameo by Bruce Willis--takes us to the roll credits. 

SPLIT is better than a fork in your eye. The movie had an interesting premise, and it is supposedly based on a true story. But we all know that means the story is two percent fact and ninety-eight percent alternative facts. If you want to know how it ends and can't guess from here, you'll have to check it out yourself. Have a few drinks first. It's way better movie if your drinking. I just didn't care about any of the characters. *Yawn*