*THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS. AVOID READING UNTIL YOU’VE SEEN SPLIT*

It should come as no surprise that Split has a twist. A really cool one.

M. Night Shyamalan’s Split is an immediately compelling film. Three young women are kidnapped from a parking lot by a mysterious man who clearly isn’t playing with a full deck, and they’re taken to some sort of underground bunker that’s strangely well-furnished. We quickly learn that the man has multiple (well over 20 of them) personalities within himself, but like the characters themselves, we have no idea why these women have been kidnapped. We have no idea what the man’s plan is. And we really have no idea what’s even going on. We just know that the many personalities seem dead set on the idea that a so-called “Beast” will soon be making an appearance. And goddamn is it tense while we wait for his arrival.

It’s no secret by now that Shyamalan is a filmmaker who builds most of his movies around a final act twist, and Split is certainly no different. We’re promised answers to all the questions we (and the characters) have been pondering throughout, and we can be pretty sure that things won’t turn out how we’re expecting them to. But the strange thing about Split is that they do. For the most part, everything about the core story ends up in the exact place we’d most expect it to. Everything the multiple characters residing within the villain (including a man, a woman, and a child) have been telling the women turns out to be true: one of those personalities is a “Beast” of sorts, and he ends up killing and consuming two of the women.

The other one, the clear survivor from the outset… she survives. Go figure.

So what’s the big twist? After the movie’s title comes up on screen and it seems to be over, we’re treated to a post-credits stinger of sorts. The occupants of a diner are watching a news story about the events we just witnessed. One of them remarks that the story seems similar to something that happened years prior: a train was blown up by a man given a villainous moniker by the media. The man sitting next to the woman who makes the comment turns out to be Bruce Willis’ heroic character from Unbreakable (and yes, he’s played by Willis). “Mr. Glass,” he tells the woman, when she inquires about the train attacker’s name. Yes, Split is revealed to be, in the literal final moment, freakin’ Unbreakable 2.

Okay so that’s super cool. My jaw honestly dropped nearly to the floor, and though I’m pretty sure most everyone else in the theater with me had no idea why such a big star like Bruce Willis was popping up for a cameo appearance at the tail end of a horror film (‘wait, is this a Die Hard movie?!‘), I can confirm that I was genuinely shocked and totally surprised. Like Shyamalan’s best twists, I damn sure didn’t see this one coming, and as I left the theater and walked to my car, I had a huge smile on my face. I was thrilled. And totally won over.

There’s simply no denying that Split‘s twist is a treat for longtime Shyamalan fans, ending the film on the highest of notes; but as I made the drive home and the thrill of that shocker wore off a bit, I began to remember that just prior to that post-credits stinger, I wasn’t exactly thrilled with the film. In fact, I was downright disappointed by the way the initially riveting events played out. The twist, though it distracted from the movie’s flaws, only distracted me for so long.

Highlighted by an incredible performance (or series of performances, really) from James McAvoy that would probably earn him an Oscar nomination had this not been a horror film, as well as yet another one from Anya Taylor-Joy that suggests she’s quickly on her way to becoming genre royalty, Split is a fine film, but it’s also one that just doesn’t really go anywhere. As compelling as it is in the early going, it eventually starts to drag and, worst of all, feel longer than it actually is. It feels as if Shyamalan didn’t quite know where to go with the clever concept (using multiple personality disorder as the basis for, essentially, a body-horror film, is pretty damn clever), and by the time the end title popped up on the screen, I had almost completely lost interest in the whole thing. The story doesn’t really even end, at least not in satisfying fashion, and in many ways it feels like a film that’s missing a few final scenes that it really needed to feel like a complete whole that said something and was worth sitting through. It could’ve also used a trim in the editing room, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about.

Let’s get back to that totally awesome twist, which provides the illusion of making the film feel complete and satisfying. It makes you forget that the actual story wasn’t very good, because holy shit, that’s Bruce Willis and this was a sequel to Unbreakable. But when you take that away, and look at the story that was actually being told in Split, you’re left with an incomplete movie that, let’s be honest, kind of shits the bed in the final act. Sure, the twist is the coolest we’ve seen in a handful of years, but it’s also one of the cheapest we’ve ever seen. Shyamalan pulls that card out way too late in the game, and he damn near pulls it from the bottom of the deck. Rather than focusing on telling us a new story, he instead chooses to remind us of an old one, hoping that we’ll be too awestruck to care that he didn’t really bother to finish that new story or create something on the level of the old one.

And it works… if only for a few minutes.

Ultimately though, Split‘s twist makes the film feel like a prequel to the nonexistent movie you’d rather watch instead: Unbreakable 2. It reminds, and not in a good way, of those superhero movies that build up excitement for the future while not actually delivering anything worthwhile in the present. I admire Shyamalan for creating his own super-villain universe of sorts (the brilliant Unbreakable, my personal favorite of his films, remains the best grounded-in-reality superhero movie ever made), and I’m hoping he does build upon it in the future, but I can’t help but be baffled by the choice to make Split a half-ass sequel to Unbreakable rather than a full-on one or, well, its own thing entirely. Had David Dunn (Bruce Willis) showed up earlier in the film, I’d probably have a new favorite movie in Split, but connecting the two in literally the final moment had a cheapness to it that rubbed me the wrong way. It was fan service, to be sure, but it was fan service that seemed specifically designed to distract us from the fact that Split was a half-cocked movie that couldn’t stand on its own two feet.

Split deserved better than its cop-out ending, cool as it may have been.