Trap
M. Night Shyamalan couldn’t get tickets to the Eras Tour and decided to make that everyone’s problem
Josh Hartnett grins and bears it in M. Night Shyamalan's Trap.
When daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) is targeted by mean girls at her school, her father Cooper (Josh Hartnett) does the ultimate Girl Dad thing: He gets her tickets to the Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) concert.
Lady Raven is the ultimate pop star. Her concerts are teeming with shrieking girls, merchandise, and flashing wristbands. But this Lady Raven concert is teeming with something else: cops. Cooper notes the increased police presence and the fact that every man at the concert is getting yanked out of the venue by armed SWAT members.
It turns out the Lady Raven concert is an elaborate trap for the notorious Philadelphia serial killer, The Butcher. The FBI has reason to believe that The Butcher will be at the concert and has the brilliant idea of trying to capture a serial killer amid thousands of underaged children.
Cooper isn’t worried about the safety of his daughter amongst the SWAT presence, he’s worried about himself. You see, Cooper is The Butcher and he’s about to have a bad night.
Can Cooper evade law enforcement without alerting his daughter to his dark secret? Is this a film or a soft launch for Shyamalan’s daughter’s singing/acting career? Will someone please get Mr. Shyamalan tickets to the Eras Tour so he doesn’t make a sequel?
M. Night Shyamalan doesn’t have a reputation for consistency. There’s a lot of bad blood between him and critics for his shoddy output. Even though I knew all too well that this flick would likely be underwhelming, never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined a movie that seems to be cobbled together from spare ideas. Everything from the writing to the cinematography feels like it’s lacking style. It’ll certainly feel like a cruel summer if you end up paying to see Trap when the Eras Tour is streaming for free on Disney Plus. Granted, the pre-production for Trap started before Swift’s Tour, but there was clearly a blank space in his movie where he wrote her name.
Look what you made me do, Shyamalan.
But with Trap, we’re not only diving into his typical underwritten Twilight Zone episode fare, we’re also making it a family project. The real twist in Trap is not so much the story, but the fact that he seemed to make an entire movie to promote his daughter’s music career and help her get into acting.
That’s right, in the middle of an already poorly conceived “thriller” about a serial killer at a concert, Shyamalan stops everything to give his daughter a staring role. We spend about an hour focused on Hartnett’s Cooper, only to have Saleka Shyamalan take over the lead for a very long 20 minutes. She has a lovely voice, but her stage choreography and acting skills make the choice to feature her feel like a slog. To be fair, playing a character that’s based on Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift, would require an enormous amount of charisma and be a feat for any actor. Saleka did write and perform 14 songs for the film, which certainly means she put in some work. Unfortunately, it’s hard to beat the nepotism allegations when it’s clear Daddy jammed you into a movie you weren’t ready to be in.
It’s even more baffling why we halt the momentum of the movie to focus on a Lady Raven when Shyamalan has veteran icons like Hayley Mills trapped in exposition roles. Mills is an FBI profiler and is forced to say some of the most horrendous psychobabble ever put to screen. It’s as if Shyamalan watched one episode of Criminal Minds and decided that was more than enough research.
The most successful story is that of Cooper trying to literally get away with murder. Thanks to Hartnett doing his best Nicolas Cage impression, Cooper is at least a fun watch. He switches from affable everyman to barely controlled psycho at the drop of a dime. It’s an entertaining performance and Hartnett does everything he can to keep this unwieldy story from tanking. Shyamalan also seems to know that Hartnett is the only reason anyone will sit through this film, as he tries to reward the audience with some gratuitous shirtless action. I can say with full confidence that Hartnett’s abs are better defined than any element of the plot.
If you’re a diehard fan of Shyamalan’s work, this is, technically, a movie. But unless you’ve been concussed recently or don’t know how to look up shirtless pictures of Josh Hartnett on the internet, I’m not sure why you’d spend money to see this nonsense.
Verdict: Nepotism has not strengthened Shyamalan’s filmmaking instincts.
Trap is rated PG-13 and is available in theaters August 2.
