2024 | PG-13 | starring Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Allison Pill, Saleka Night Shyamalan | written & directed by M. Night Shyamalan | 1h 45m | 1 out of 5 stars |
At this point we all know M. Night Shyamalan’s modus operandi. He had a few hits in the early 2000s, collapsed into a string of duds, had a creative spike going independent with The Visit and Split and has collapsed again recently, this time into an era of seemingly subverting expectations, where the man behind the twist would deliver a twist that there was no twist. Where he will set up heroes and unceremoniously kill them off and showdowns that aren’t paid off. Previously he was subject to a studio that wouldn’t tell him No and now as an independent filmmaker of mid-budget thrillers he is insulated in a creative rut where nobody can tell him No. He is the master of setting up an interesting or clever premise and then allowing it to completely get away from him under a pile of stilted dialog, bad acting, a mountain of unnecessary exposition and self-indulgent leaps in logic. It’s all on display again in Trap, which even for Shyamalan’s increasingly wacky record of movies is a baffling piece of nonsense.
Pitched as “Silence of the Lambs at a Taylor Swift concert”, Shyamalan knows how to deliver an elevator pitch. Josh Hartnett plays a father named Cooper who takes his daughter (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert of her favorite pop star, Lady Raven (Saleka NIght Shyamalan), only to discover that the entire concert is a trap set by the FBI to catch him, a man with a double life as a serial killer known as The Butcher. While the FBI profile (Hayley Mills) plots outside, Cooper plots his escape from the concert.
From the very beginning, Shyamalan doesn’t seem to understand even what’s interesting about his own premise. This should be a big version of the single location thriller where we learn that our hero is actually the person the cops are looking for after we learn that the building is a trap. Instead, Shyamalan orders these reveals backwards, telling us that Cooper is a killer with a man kidnapped in his basement that he’s watching on a live cell phone feed and then that the concert he’s inside is a trap. What proceeds for the next 2 acts is an endless series of idiotic decisions by Cooper to try to charm his way around cops, sneak past the stadium merchants and persuade his daughter into one goofy scheme after another. A premise like this is a fiendishly clever puzzle box that a good writer would delight in trying to solve. How would you have a serial killer escape an FBI sting in public place without being seen and make it both believable and thrilling for the audience?
At every turn, Shyamalan takes the laziest possible approach. Instead of doing the work of making Cooper a Hannibal Lecter-esque genius who manipulates human psychology, he simply makes everyone around him an idiot. Instead of making the movie a cat and mouse game between the profiler and Cooper, he puts the profiler character completely out of the movie in the third act for a rotating series of new protagonists. Instead of committing to the claustrophobic, crowded, walls of the concert, Shyamalan moves out of it for the entire, overly-long third act. Shyamalan never even decides if Cooper is a charming anti-hero or a full-blown villain. Hartnett’s portrayal of the character is more like a doopy dad, Shyamalan writes him like a violent psychopath and then never shows Cooper taking a single life. Heck, Shyamalan can’t think of a more specific serial killer name than The Butcher. Does he have a weapon of choice? Why does he have this guy tied up? What’s his plan for these people? It’s all left unclear for the sake of the commercially friendly PG-13 rating. It’s like in Split when Shyamalan had a guy bark like a dog in his underwear as a stand-in for actual sexual abuse. This movie dances around anything that might actually be intense or horrific.
Trap, unlike Old or Knock at the Cabin, actually doesn’t feel like a movie that lacks creativity as much as it feels like one of utter laziness. It’s the work of someone who couldn’t care less if it makes sense from minute to minute, if his anti-hero is at all believable, if any of the dialog sounds like something an actual person would say. That’s where the cynical idea that this is all just a big advertisement for the singing career of Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka comes into play. Shyamalan allows the movie to stop dead several times to focus on Saleka singing.
There’s another kernel of an idea I like here. It’s following the father taking his daughter to a pop concert of thousands of screaming pre-teen girls. That sense of feeling like you’re in a place that’s not at all in your element, that’s uncomfortable, but doing it to make someone else happy. That the movie accidentally heightens that by having one of the few distinguishing features of the killer known to the cops during this sting is that he is “a man” which results in dads being dragged out of their seats by cops all over the stadium. That’s where anything relatable ends and the only-in-a-movie contrivances begin. And they don’t let up until the very last frame.
The third act of this movie is an extended jaw-dropper of bad decisions with Shyamalan stalling while he tries to find a way to end all this. He brings in a new potential hero, then another at the last second, then an explanation for the sting operation that is better left unsaid and then a typical movie serial killer Norman Bates mother fixation. It’s exhausting. Trap is a train wreck that would be laughably bad if it wasn’t so frustrating. It amazes me that Shyamalan still has so many defenders, defenders of this movie even. That so many people are willing to read into it either profundity or comical self-awareness that I don’t see anywhere near his latest works. The robotic dialog, the implausible plotting, the self-serving indulgences, the misplaced humor, the poorly directed actors, the intriguing premise that dies on the vine – if you’re still down for Shyamalan’s trademark brand of lunacy that’s something I don’t get.