Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Night Shyamalan
Runtime: 105 minutes
Rating: 2 / 5
M. Night Shyamalan has had an uneven career, to say the least. The writer-director burst onto the scene with early hits like “The Sixth Sense” and “Signs”, films that established the now-iconic “Shyamalan twist”. But over the years, he struggled to live up to his initial hype, churning out movies that ranged from disappointing (“The Happening”) to universally despised (“The Last Airbender”, which has a Rotten Tomato score of just 5%, was described by Roger Ebert as “an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented”). Perhaps what makes Shyamalan’s movies so frustrating is that the initial premise always seem so promising. A farmer dealing with mysterious crop circles? Intriguing! A village that is trapped by mysterious creatures in the woods? Spooky! An airborne virus that causes infected people to kill themselves? Great, take my money and give me a ticket now!
Unfortunately, Shyamalan often fumbles the execution. And “Trap”, his latest release, is no different.
As the film opens, we find Adam Cooper (played affably by Josh Hartnett) taking his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) for a lovely daddy-daughter night out at a concert put on by Lady Raven, a kind of Taylor Swift-meets-Duo Lipa pop singer (played by Saleka Night Shyamalan, the director’s daughter). However, Adam soon realizes that the excessive police presence isn’t there just for security. The concert, in fact, is an elaborate sting operation set up to catch a serial killer named “The Butcher”. This is a problem for Adam – mainly because he’s The Butcher they’re looking for. What follows is a tense (or at least Shyamalan’s attempt at tense) effort by Adams to get out of the concert and allude capture without letting his daughter know what’s wrong.
It’s an interesting idea, one described as “‘Silence of the Lambs’ Meets Taylor Swift Concert”. Unfortunately, Shyamalanfalls victim to the same problems with plot he’s faced in the past. The main problem is that the police don’t know who The Butcher is or even what he looks like apart from generic descriptions provided by the police criminal profiler, whose expert profiling boils down to “a tall man in his 30’s or early 40’s”. So how do they plan to identify Adams once they find him? That’s never explained. And why the need for such a convoluted escape plan? If the police don’t know what he looks like, couldn’t he just act normal and walk out with the crowd? The film makes clear he’s an expert liar, and anyways the police seem pretty incompetent.
Plot holes aren’t a mortal cinematic sin, of course. Plenty of good movies have logical lapses (Why didn’t Frodo and Sam just fly the eagles to Mount Doom?!), and part of enjoying a film is suspension of disbelief. But when key plot elements are left unexplained and the central problem could be solved by essentially doing nothing, it’s a sign that the screenplay needed another draft.
What adds to the frustration is that, as bad as Shyamalan is with a pen, he is excellent with a camera. He is a master of unsettling shots, and when he gets back to basics – disturbed characters, tight spaces, tense standoffs – he knows how to build suspense. It’s too bad that it’s all in service of a story that stumbles forward with gaps in logic or explanation.
Josh Hartnett puts in a commendable performance as doofy dad / psychotic killer, and it’s great to see him break away from the heartthrob typecasting he found himself boxed in by early in his career. There’s some nice chemistry between him and Ariel Donoghue, like when he tries to learn teen lingo, and Donoghue plays his idol-obsessed teenage daughter with charm and effusive energy. They’re both committed to the script despite how transparently silly and, in places, just plain dumb it is.
Shyamalan’s decision to cast his daughter, Saleka Shyamalan, as pop star Lady Raven has mixed results, though. She is a good singer and dancer, and her music – which she also wrote for the film – has the kind of generic pop sound that you’d expect teenage girls to go crazy for. But at times, the older Shyamalan’s lingering shots and extended takes of her performance feel like a not-so-subtle push for his daughter’s career. And when she takes on a bigger role in the film’s second half, her inexperience as an actress comes through.
Shyamalan has once again stumbled into making a film that is half-baked and half as smart as he thinks. He has spent his career shunning Hollywood and making his own path, studio support be damned. It’s commendable, but so is recognizing one’s strengths and weaknesses. Plenty of directors don’t write the films they make, or they know when to bring in others to help iron out issues with character and plot. Here, the real trap is the trap of hubris, and Shyamalan himself is the victim.