Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Year Released: 2016
Rating: 2.0
Three teenage girls (Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson and Jessica Sula) are kidnapped by a deeply troubled man (James McAvoy) who supposedly has 24 different personalities (!) - eventually, he warns his all-too-understanding shrink Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley) that there's a 25th (!!) personality emerging and it's really frickin' scary. Works solely as a showcase of a skilled actor (McAvoy) given a silly script trying (desperately) to keep the project from being a personal embarrassment - to his credit, he manages to be semi-convincing in a studio workshop/M.F.A. kind-of way. The vaguely anti-psychiatry slant I detected early on (Fletcher's compassion and ignorance are her downfall) went away in the third act when I realized the real Shyamalan Twist here is that he's making yet another goddamn superhero movie (remember Unbreakable?) and McAvoy's shotgun-proof zoo worker is some sort of X-Men reject. Try not to laugh (like I did) when an old woman gets bear-hugged to death.
