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Premise has never been a standout issue for M. Night Shyamalan as a filmmaker. I’d go as far as to say that I would probably be a much bigger fan of his work if his filmography entirely consisted of “Story By” credits. The guy clearly has a knack for coming up with smart high concept plots – be it a psychologist who councils a boy who can see dead people or vacationers who get stuck on a beach where they start rapidly getting older. It’s unfortunately proper execution that so regularly eludes him, and in that respect, Trap is the latest title to be added to continuously growing pile.
Trap
Release Date: August 2, 2024
Directed By: M. Night Shyamalan
Written By: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Hayley Mills, and Alison Pill
Rating: PG-13 for some violent content and brief strong language
Runtime: 105 minutes
The new movie is Shyamalan at his most Hitchcockian – the writer/director designing a puzzle that a shady protagonist must solve – but where it falls apart is in its inability to do anything inventive with its principal idea. The fun hook of a story like this is meant to have the lead character demonstrate exceptional slyness and creativity as they realistically try and weasel their way out of trouble, but the film fails the clever test and is mostly a bore as a result, and it regularly bends plausibility enough to ruin the stakes.
To the credit of M. Night Shyamalan, he doesn’t pretend that you haven’t seen the trailer for Trap and have no idea what it’s about going in. Josh Hartnett stars as Cooper Adams, a man successfully compartmentalizing a double life: he’s a family man and loving father to his music-loving teen daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), but he’s also a serial killer known as The Butcher who has been terrorizing the city of Philadelphia for seven years.
Living in his dad role for an afternoon, he gets tickets to see Riley’s favorite singer, Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan), in concert, but he gets a bit spooked when he starts noticing an extreme police presence at the event. Via the exact kind of exceptionally clumsy exposition that lets you know that you are watching an M. Night Shyamalan film, Cooper ends up learning from an arena employee (Jonathan Langdon) that the cops got a tip that The Butcher was at the show, and they are questioning everybody who fits the killer’s profile.
Desperate to escape, Cooper begins to test exit strategies, but also has to keep returning to his seat so that Riley doesn’t become suspicious that something is wrong.
Trap fails to pick a lane regarding how we’re meant to feel about Josh Harnett’s Cooper, and it’s a significant problem.
Trap vacillates between boring and ridiculous as Cooper tries to find his way to freedom, the latter leadings to awful swings that cause the whole thing to go off the rails in the final hour, but deeper than bad plot developments is an inability for the film to communicate how the audience is meant to feel about the main character. It’s not unusual for a movie to make you root for a criminal’s escape, but Shyamalan tries to do that while also selling the guy as a monster, and it yields a mess.
Overt efforts are made to get the audience to like Cooper: he’s established as a loving father who likes to make silly dad jokes (and has no intention of abandoning her), we are always locked into his perspective, and everything that’s terrible about The Butcher is noticeably told instead of shown. Simultaneously, however, this background picture of Philadelphia’s notorious serial killer is horrendous, and there is a natural part of any sane person’s brain that doesn’t want to see this guy elude authorities and live a free life with his innocent daughter.
Trap tries to make you both root for and against its protagonist, and the main thing it ends up doing is nullifying the stakes. Along with The Butcher’s general unremarkable-ness (his presented serial killer profile feels like it’s read from a textbook), by the time the story veers towards its conclusion, there is nothing compelling you to care about what’s going to happen with the character.
Trying to kick start the Josh Hartnett renaissance is stunt casting that doesn’t work.
An unexpected flaw in the mix is the casting of Josh Hartnett. Bringing the young star of The Faculty in for the role feels like M. Night Shyamalan trying a bit of Tarantino-esque actor resurrection, but Hartnett’s performance is part of the problem when it comes to the presentation of Cooper as a protagonist. Shyamalan tries to flip Hartnett’s image as a good looking, charismatic good guy, but the range isn’t shown on screen.
The star has no problem when it comes to playing the goofy dad who is trying to give his daughter the best day of her life at a concert for her favorite artist, but the writer/director also tries to orchestrate multiple moments where we are meant to see The Butcher emerge in his eyes, his smile dropping and anger emerging when no one is looking… but it never clicks. His glare should evoke chills, and while the movies’ aforementioned decision to tell and not show is partially to blame, it’s just not something that Hartnett is able to sell.
This issue becomes more problematic as Trap enters its third act, as Cooper’s mask slips off with his desperation rising, but for what it’s worth, you’re far more distracted as an audience member by the bad, preposterous narrative turns than Hartnett’s inability to demonstrate an inner demon.
Between the bad character development, poor plotting, failing stakes, and underwhelming presentation of a cinematic concert experience (why is there a greater focus on video projection than on-stage choreography or performance?), Trap is M. Night Shyamalan’s weakest creation since 2019’s Glass and a big disappointment. It’s easy as a cinephile to root for the filmmaker, as he has made some great movies in his career, but this is most definitely not one of them.