Saturday, July 5, 2025

Trap

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M. Night Shyamalan's latest thriller, Trap, is mind-bending poser like his previous pictures but not in the same way.
The biggest question this film poses is "What kind of movie was it meant to be?"
Trap -- which stars Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Shyamalan's daughter Saleka, and, inexplicably, Hayley Mills -- is set in Shyamalan's favorite location city, Philadelphia, during a Gen Z concert by superstar Lady Raven (Saleka).
Hartnett plays doting Dad and firefighter Cooper who takes daughter Riley (Donoghue) to the concert as a reward for outstanding work in the classroom. When Cooper sees the arena is overflowing with police and FBI he asks a concert merch vendor (a nice turn by Jonathan Langdon) and is told law enforcement received a tip the serial killer called The Butcher will be at the show.
The audience will discover pretty quickly that Hartnett is the suspect (though the movie never shows Cooper actually butchering anyone). The first two-thirds of the film is Cooper trying to evade the clutches of FBI profiler Dr. Grant (Mills) while not raising his fangirl-daughter's suspicions.
A master fabricator with an ingratiating smile, Cooper nearly pulls it off with some implausible scheming involving a gullible concert usher (Shyamalan in his obligatory cameo) and Lady Raven, herself.
The last act, which introduces Cooper's wife and Riley's mother Rachel (Alison Pill), is where Shyamalan's exposition goes off the rails and the narrative action becomes inert. In fact, what action there was happened mostly on the concert stage where Saleka (who wrote and performed original music in the film) holds court.
Overall, Shyamalan's script is weak in tension and emotional cohesion and clarity. Are we supposed to pull for the handsome Father of the Year who dismembered a dozen people or pray that the Swat team stomps him into the ground? Is Shyamalan's story about sociopathy, societal breakdown, parental dysfunction or the hidden perils of teen pop?
Some might say it doesn't matter, but I couldn't stop wondering which kind of picture I was watching, and that puzzlement made the talk and mugging on the screen a real distraction.

 

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