‘Trap’ is Glorious Crap

In M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Trap,’ a serial killer known as “The Butcher” takes his tween daughter to a pop concert in Philadelphia. The FBI has somehow deduced that he will be there, and has flooded the zone with more law-enforcement personnel than anyone could possibly afford for anything. The Butcher, whose real name is Cooper (also the name of my brother-in-law’s dog), somehow figures out what’s going on, and tries to escape the snare.

This is the movie’s wackadoo premise, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously, though it’s not quite as fun as it should be. Josh Hartnett certainly has big comeback energy as Cooper, toggling back and forth between happy dad mode and barely repressed sadism. His daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) is on the screen a lot in the movie’s first two thirds, and she is cute, but is perhaps the most simple-minded tween in movie history. That says less about Donoghue’s performance than it does about Shyamalan’s script. As a director, he’s a master of building tension. Rarely do you find yourself not wanting to see what happens next. But even a quarter-century into his filmmaking career, his scripts feel like something a 12-year-old wrote for a competition, tweens writing about tweens.

TRAP  ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan
Written by: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Hayley Mills, Saleka Shyamalan, Alison Pill
Running time: 105 mins

His main FBI “profiler,” played, in a clever bit of meta-casting, by Hayley Mills from the original Parent Trap (get it?) has brilliantly decided that The Butcher is a white man in his 30s, perhaps early 40s, flattering to Hartnett, who’s actually 46. At the concert, that narrows it down to about 3000 suspects, which seems like a lot considering that the audience for the concert is mostly young girls. Maybe the police have bigger problems on their hands than a serial killer. Mills’s profiling includes a lot of psychological mumbo-jumbo like the killer is able to compartmentalize different personas, the usual Shyamalan nonsense. Have you seen Mindhunter, Zodiac, Longlegs, or The Silence of The Lambs? You have. M. Night Shyamalan isn’t David Fincher. He has nothing new to say about serial killers and how they operate.

Onto the concert itself. The movie’s cleverest conceit is that it contains the action and narrative in the arena, until it doesn’t, and then it becomes much less clever. Our popstar is “Lady Raven,” kind of a boring amalgam of Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift. Lady Raven is played by Saleka Shyamalan, the eldest daughter of the director. She wrote and performed all the songs, which are neither particularly memorable nor terrible, but since she’s an actual pop performer in real life, it works pretty well. However, the movie’s final third, which takes place after the concert ends, requires Saleka to act. While she’s an appealing presence, her vocal range far exceeds the range of emotions she can display on demand.

On the other hand, the movie saves its best actor for the end. Alison Pill, an extremely strong TV performer underused in film, brings some genuine pathos and emotion into a hilariously underwritten role as The Butcher’s wife. And Hartnett himself, sensing an opportunity, increasingly chews up every scene he’s in, and he’s in basically every scene. Trap is a dumb movie, a very dumb movie, and it’s relatively predictable as M. Night Shyamalan joints go. But it’s less full of pretentiousness and sci-fi junk as some of his films, and many of the twists boil down to Cooper figuring out how to open a door. If you think about this movie for more than five minutes, you’ve really thought too hard. In that sense, it’s not really a trap at all.