By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue and Saleka Night Shyamalan
Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Warner Bros.
TRAP continues the current trend of thriller titles that are simple and to the point/amusingly banal (take your pick), which began with last year’s PLANE and will continue with its follow-up (no kidding) SHIP. Of course, this being an M. Night Shyamalan film, the expectation is that this will not be a generic, by-the-numbers exercise but will explore an offbeat premise and contain at least one major twist that bids to blow the audience’s mind. TRAP, unfortunately, is just one more reminder that Shyamalan’s triumph with THE SIXTH SENSE is only getting longer and longer ago.
Once upon a time, THE SIXTH SENSE’s Big Reveal, and keeping that secret, was the talk of the summer 1999 film season. Now, TRAP’s biggest plot pivot occurs in the first act, and has been revealed in both trailers. Cooper (Josh Hartnett) at first comes off like a loving if slightly awkward suburban dad taking his 12-year-old daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a major concert by her pop idol, Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan). As they arrive, they’re offered prime tickets by a scalper, with Cooper advising Riley, “Don’t let people fool you” (nudge, nudge). Among the throngs of fans, there’s an especially large police/SWAT presence at the event, and Cooper spies a couple of men being plucked out of the audience and led away by the authorities. It quickly turns out there’s good reason for him to be concerned: He’s a long-operating serial killer who has become known as “The Butcher,” and law enforcement, having discovered that this very wanted man will be attending the show, has turned the arena into a giant trap for him.
You might question how they know that The Butcher will be in attendance, when they have no other concrete information about him; we do find out eventually, and the answer is less than convincing. Nor does the film make a persuasive case for exactly how they intend to root out The Butcher from among the 3,000 or so adult males attending the concert. In charge of the operation is profiler Dr. Josephine Grant (Hayley Mills, of all people, apparently cast for no other reason than that she starred in the original THE PARENT TRAP), who mostly walks around saying things like “He’s realized he can’t get out” when she doesn’t seem to have much basis for her deductions.
Meanwhile, Cooper keeps leaving Riley to her adulation while he cases the joint to determine a way out. Given that there’s no particular reason for us to root for his escape, there could have been some fun in his desperate attempts to slip away in the midst of throngs of both cops/agents and fans. Instead, in a series of contrived scenes, Cooper very easily gets his intel from a loquacious merch seller, some rather inattentive squad members, etc. He’s also able to commit a few minor crimes with no one amongst the crowds spotting him, and any sense of plausibility completely falls apart in a sequence leading Riley to join Lady Raven on stage, which also occasions writer/director Shyamalan’s usual gratuitous cameo (albeit a more appropriate one here).
TRAP quickly becomes one of those thrillers whose plotting depends on convenience rather than cleverness, which saps away the tension. And even if you do get caught up in Cooper’s situation, the latter portions of the movie involve a change of emphasis that undercuts any elemental involvement with the story and proceeds via some very questionable behavior on the part of its characters. Without giving anything away, TRAP comes to feel like parts of two different movies awkwardly spliced together, as if Shyamalan wanted to explore a young girl’s discovery that her father is a monster, but then decided he also wanted to make the film a vehicle for his own daughter’s singing career.
There’s promise regarding the former in the early scenes’ sweet father-daughter chemistry between Hartnett and Donoghue, and Saleka Night Shyamalan has the chops as a pop singer. The concert sequences are well-staged and shot (by the SUSPIRIA remake’s Sayombhu Mukdeeprom), and while this writer has never attended a performance by obvious models Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo, they certainly felt authentic. It’s a shame, then, that what goes on in and around them is far less credible, and also that Cooper’s psychopathology isn’t presented consistently enough for us to really know and fear him. Sometimes he’s a tortured soul with mommy issues, sometimes he’s a diabolical plotter à la Hannibal Lecter, and Hartnett’s performance alternates between mannered and maniacal without allowing us to get enough of a handle on him. The twist in TRAP, it turns out, is that the final-reel developments come as no surprise, but land as unfortunately predictable.
