TRAP - Mark Reviews Movies

Trap, Warner Bros. Piictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 2, 2024

Writer/director M. Night Shyamalan knows he has a fantastic premise with Trap. Oddly, his complete inability to pay it off in the end more or less proves it.

Here's the setup. A man and his daughter attend a concert. Everything seems perfectly ordinary. The father tries to connect with his daughter but can't help to be awkward in the attempts and to cover his ears as soon as the crowd starts cheering, while the pre-teen daughter is embarrassed but appreciative to see her favorite pop star with her dad. Shyamalan starts to focus on other details, mainly the number of security officials and police officers around the venue. Such a thing is normal, of course, but the only reason it seems odd is because the father is one who does notice—and keeps noticing—how many cops there are and where they are.

Say what you will about his writing (There's plenty to say about it here later), but Shyamalan can be quite the confident director when he wants to be. He definitely wants to be here, and the introduction to this plot puts that on full display. We know something is off about this situation, and Shyamalan knows the important details aren't what we see. What's significant and off-putting is that we're watching Cooper (Josh Hartnett), the seemingly plain and boring and uncomfortable father, watching his surroundings, like cornered and frightened prey—or, maybe, like a predator looking for a meal.

It turns out to be a bit of both, because Cooper has a secret. He's a serial killer, known as "the Butcher," and in one of his assorted safe houses, he currently has an abducted man, his next victim, tied up in the basement. From an all-too-helpful merchandise seller, Cooper discovers that the local cops and the FBI have surrounded the building, are questioning each and every man who fits the multiple and conflicting eyewitness descriptions of the killer, and won't let anyone who fits the bill out of the building without an interrogation.

Cooper is stuck, and for a long while, Shyamalan follows him in a game of cat-and-mouse—evading the cops' notice, trying to gain the upper hand on his pursuers by learning as much information as he can about their manhunt, improvising various distractions, keeping everyone from becoming suspicious of him and his actions. For this lengthy section, Shyamalan's camera sticks with Cooper, and yes, it is a bit of a cheat on the filmmaker's part to give the killer a sympathetic edge by making him a devoted and loving father.

The better makers of thrillers with amoral or immoral characters know the camera is a machine that generates sympathy. The best ones toy with that inherent contradiction and, in doing so, make us root for the bad guy to get away with it all.

Shyamalan isn't quite as confident as that, unfortunately, but the concert section of this movie is cleverly staged, if ridiculously unlikely at times, and depends entirely on Hartnett's ability to hold our attention, making us question whether or not we should be rooting for Cooper to escape this elaborate snare. The actor pulls it off effortlessly, because we're never entirely certain what the truth is behind the character's cold eyes and often-phony smile.

There is a hint of genuineness when Cooper is with his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue). As he starts leaving her on her own at a packed concert and using her as one of the tools in his arsenal, though, can we even believe the one potentially redeeming thing Shyamalan establishes about the character from the very start?

Hartnett's performance really does carry this segment, and beyond the fact that the later stages of Shyamalan's game are severely undercut by one unconvincing performance and one shift in perspective too many, the story is ultimately undone by making Cooper a supporting player and transforming him into a generic threat. The character is far more intriguing and compelling as the protagonist of a wicked series of on-the-fly schemes, using that observational intelligence and the uncanny capacity to fake being a nice, boring man to great effect. As in those introductory scenes, Shyamalan uses the camera to track Cooper's logic and conniving as it happens.

The good news for Shyamalan is that the grave errors of this movie happen late enough that they shouldn't be specified in a review. What can be said of them, though, is the presence of the filmmaker's daughter Saleka Night Shyamalan as Lady Raven. She's the popular singer on stage, whose music (written and performed by the actor) is fine as the background soundtrack for the setting but whose increased involvement in the plot is only slightly less implausible than the first-time actor's performance is unpersuasive. The narrative changes so much by that point that the younger Shyamalan's shortcomings are a detriment to a decent idea.

Without putting the blame on only one actor, the later ideas of Trap, once the concert is finished, are only decent or, in the case of the last few twists and turns, quite dumb. The proof of the strength of Shyamalan's initial premise is that, once it's completed, the rest of the movie doesn't know what to do with itself.

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