Alex Wheeler Movie Ops

Trap is a simple movie with an ungodly amount of baggage. It’s simple because it’s a methodically nonsensical story about a serial killer evading capture. It’s got baggage because it comes from writer/director M. Night Shyamalan. Insert career retrospective of thrilling early highs, devastating mid-career lows, and the mess of decent-to-terrible movies he’s currently churning out here. If you’re still holding tight to preconceived notions about Shyamalan’s films, just stop. His days of thoughtful, twisty films are long past him, having evened out into a more broad genre filmmaker than most give him credit for.

For this outing, he just wanted to make a film with his daughter Saleka. She stars as Lady Raven, a musician giving a stadium concert in Philly, the one Josh Harnett’s serial killer dad gets trapped at. The film was designed as part concert film, part thriller, and it trudges along respectfully through both.

Saleka wrote music for the film, and at least in this staged version of a pop star, she seems like the real deal. It’s not a stretch to imagine thousands of girls screaming along with her creations, and the design of her show looks enough like any given pop star’s stadium tour to pass muster. Her acting is even fine, so anyone complaining on and on about nepotism is getting too caught up in invented problems.

And there’s no need for that because Trap has plenty of real problems. It’s thriller side has two parts, only one of which really works. The promised cat-and-mouse games of the trailer, where Hartnett’s Cooper tries to slip past the FBI’s swarming presence at Lady Raven’s concert, proves to be a trifling exercise. Hartnett does his best to play up the increasing pressure, but his character is mostly bumbling, showing little consistency with how smart he allegedly is and how devoted of a father he may or may not be. You see, he’s at the concert with his daughter, so he can’t just slip out and leave her. Only sometimes he’s ready to do just that. Is this terrible writing or a reflection of his deeply split identity?

I’m ungenerous given how rote his attempts to leave are and how lucky the final solution ends up being. But at least that gets us to the better part of the film, where Cooper is freed from the initial trap and enters another he never saw coming. From here on out, things make even less sense, but the expanded world means Hartnett gets to bounce off more intelligent adults and squirm through more varied scenarios.

That’s all this movie really is: a sequence of scenarios. Some truly put Hartnett’s Cooper in a tough spot. Others, though, are middling setups that leave Hartnett flailing to make them exciting. The balance just barely leans towards the former, so the movie manages to remain entertaining.

Like so many of Shyamalan’s films, it doesn’t make sense, especially after all the pieces are laid out. If you’re expecting a twist, there really isn’t one. Or, at least not one you won’t see coming. The premise of the concert trap makes no sense from square one: how would the FBI know he’s here but not know his identity? How could such a smart killer make such a strange mistake?

The only answers are either terrible writing or that info is being withheld, both of which are very plausible coming from Shyamalan. But as soon as a late, instantly recognizable cast member shows up, you know they’re the lynchpin to the plot, and any mystery about what’s been going on is cleared up. Granted, even with this answer, the events still don’t play out in a coherent way, so hey, the answers are both withheld information and bad writing!

Thankfully, there’s no attempted grand moral, or even an attempted dive into a serial killer’s psychology. The film’s only concerned with traps and Saleka, which is sweetly simple in its way. Shyamalan is just a man who makes movies while being a dad. The two sides of himself intersect here, and he pulls off an adequate balance of both. Sure, he made a movie with his daughter, but it’s not a terrible movie, and his daughter certainly isn’t what weighs it down. The baggage comes from M. Night alone, from the rudimentary setup he stays in for too long to the inconsistent character he abandons Hartnett with. At least he still has a keen eye for how silly the world is. Without those bits of humor, the trap might not have been enough.

Release: Available now in theaters
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Writers: M. Night Shyamalan
Cast: Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Alison Pill, Hayley Mills