Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. M. Night Shyamalan is a conundrum. Not because he made great films and then made shitty films. That happens. He's puzzling to me because there seems to be a sweet spot with him budget-wise where he has enough money to get A-list talent in front of and behind the camera, but doesn't have enough to lose his goddamn mind with excess.
I love The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs. They're all tops when it comes to production value (his DPs were Tak Fujimoto and Eduardo Serra over those three films) and casting. The Village and Lady in the Water are misfires on a script level, but at least they're ambitious and still look great.
He's never made a movie as bad as The Last Airbender (yes, including The Happening) and that was the most money he's ever had to work with. It looks like shit, it's incoherent and it had such a strong foundation!
At this stage in his career he's doing something smart: He's cutting his budgets and going back to basics, but it doesn't seem to be clicking. I don't think he has another script in him like The Sixth Sense, a project he's been chasing to greater or lesser success since 1999, but that's fine. Orson Welles started with his best film first, too. It happens.
The Visit was fine. It's a long Twilight Zone episode that had pretty clever use of the found footage, but it was about 5 years too late to really hit big with audiences. Now we've seen the trailer for Split and it has the misfortune of coming out so closely with 10 Cloverfield Lane.
The movie looks silly, but I'm a big fan of James McAvoy and getting to watch him sink his teeth into this character is the main draw of this picture for me. I worry that it's on the lower end of Shyamalan's budgetary curve, but there's that little nugget of interest in there for me.
Check out the trailer below and let me know what you think.
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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