The Founder Review and Split Review — Lisa Johnson Mandell gives you two takes for the price of one.

The Founder Review

The Founder tells the fascinating story of Ray Kroc, the pseudo father of McDonalds. Too bad the film is not nearly as fascinating as it would, could or should be. Michael Keaton, who plays Kroc, does about as well as the script allows (with the exception of that weird overbite affectation), but the A to B to C narrative with nary a nuance in between makes it feel like a decades old news reel. Perhaps that was intentional, since the majority of the “action” happens in the fifties.

The problem with this one dimensional film is that we never see Kroc feel the consequences of his actions, other than getting rich and getting a new, hot young wife (who happens to be the wife of his friend and business associate when they first met). He dispatches his first wife (Laura Dern) with an abrupt “I want a divorce,” and poof! she’s gone. He dispatches the real founders of McDonald’s (a couple of fatally conservative brothers), legally, if not morally, yanking the company out from under them, with an equal lack of remorse or consequence.

In the end, his hard work and persistence are presented as justification for everything he did, and he’s painted as a great, self-satisfied man. An exceptionally sappy score punctuates this message. Director John Lee Hancock (Saving Mr. Banks, The Blind Side) could have done so much better.

https://youtu.be/KH3b6bs8llA

Rated PG-13

1 Hour 55 Minutes

Split Review

Director M. Night Shyamalan is up to his old (and best) tricks again, and if his goal was to create a truly disturbing film, he’s certainly accomplished that with Split. He’s managed to combine the horrors of murder, kidnapping, child abuse, mutilation, canibalism and  dissociative identity disorder (split personalities) all into one film. The result is at the least disquieting, and at the most downright terrifying.

James McAvoy does an outstanding job of playing Kevin, a man who manifests unique physical attributes for each of his 24 personalities. The tension begins when several of the personalities work together to kidnap three teenage girls, for purposes so dire they can only be hinted at…at first. Has the quiet girl’s troubled past uniquely prepared her to save them all? I can’t tell you that, but I can tell you that grown men in the screening I attended were squealing like babies at the end.

Rated PG-13

1 Hour 56 Minutes

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The Founder Review and Split Review — Lisa Johnson Mandell gives you two takes for the price of one.