Notes, page 6

This movie doesn’t know when to calm down. Exhausting!

I was pleasantly surprised by how genuinely funny and creatively consistent this movie is — and it’s clear that everyone was having fun while making it. Pretty great!

You can tell that they tried (most of the time), but it’s not as sharp as it clearly thinks it is. Also, they shouldn’t have let Ryan Reynolds pick all the songs.

Fun to watch and kinda cool in a sort of childish, cartoony way. I wish it had learned even further in that direction.

So enamored with the poetry of its own subtext that it fails to make the actual text engaging. The slow, painful lingering is fitting, but at some point it’s too much and there’s not much else there to balance it out — even the action sequences seem drawn out. Starts out pensive, ends up boring. Still, there’s an interesting story there if you can catch it being mumbled at you.

Soulless and devoid of artistry. It’s built around social commentary but never in an honest or insightful way — there’s a constant tinge of disdain for the issues it tries to build jokes around. As it goes through the motions of its terrible boilerplate script it is never truly funny or surprising; the most it can muster is being face-palm stupid when it goes for the focus group-approved absurdist humor.

(I thought it was bad.)

This is the superhero equivalent of a zombie movie where the characters keep saying the word “zombie” all the time.

The writing here is even worse than Split. The core plot device (what Sarah Paulson spends most of the movie doing) simply doesn’t work! It never felt the least bit believable. It’s a premise completely at odds with Shyamalan’s direction in the previous films, what he’s been showing us this whole time. It doesn’t work for the viewer, and it shouldn’t have worked for the characters — which makes it a double-whammy of dumb. This is, of course, all done in favor of a big twist (and, in my case, a big sigh).

I really might have to revisit Unbreakable, which I thought was cool however many years ago I watched it. I’m hoping it holds up.

Have Shyamalan’s films always been this shallow? Nothing feels real outside the very narrow confines of what is happening. Dialogue is often poor, with way too much “as you know, Bob” going on. And all the buildup fell flat for me — I was neither shocked nor emotionally invested. I guess I’d better not rewatch Unbreakable, or risk disappointment.