Split Review: The film bores you with a plainly told story, devoid of Shyamalan's trademark surprises

Film: Split

Dir: M Night Shyamalan
Cast: James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy, Betty Buckley, Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula
Rating: ** (2 Stars)

What's it about: 
Three girls Claire (Richardson), Marcia (Sula) and Casey (Taylor-Joy) are abducted from a parking lot and taken to a facility where a seemingly psychotic stranger named Dennis (McAvoy) keeps them captive to be 'sacrificed' to something called The Beast.
Meanwhile, a certain Miss Patricia shows up to tell them there is no way out, and then, a nine-year-old Hedwig eventually becomes friends with Casey, who tries to convince Hedwig to let her go. Barry, on the other hand, meets with a psychiatrist Dr Karen Fletcher (Buckley) as part of their appointments. And that's when you learn that Patricia, Dennis, Barry and Hedwig are all personalities that reside within a certain Kevin Wendell Crumb (McAvoy), who has 23 personalities in all. One more is rumoured and is called the Beast 
Do the girls escape? Does Dr Fletcher know what her patient is up to? Why is this all happening, anyway?

What's hot: 
McAvoy's fantastic turn as the multiple dissociative personality disorder sufferer, Kevin Crumb. Taylor-Joy's characteristically played girl who's deeply aware of captivity and how to deal with it.

What's not:
As claustrophobically intense as this premise is, it's hard to root for the girls. Save for Casey and Hedwig's interactions, the screenplay goes nowhere. The film bores you with a plainly told story, devoid of MNS's trademark surprises. So much so, when the film ends, you don't much care for either captor or captive. What could have been an engaging study into a human's capacity for darkness and the circumstances that lead him/her there, peters out to be a lot less than that. 

What to do:
Save for that unexpected cameo at the very end of the film, you have little to sit through this film for. Avoidable.