Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Hayley Mills, Allison Pill
I don't always like M. Night Shyamalan's movies, but I
always like the idea of an M. Night Shyamalan movie. The writer/director
has a knack for coming up with high concept pitches that's practically
unrivalled in modern mainstream genre cinema. When he pulls off those
ideas (The Sixth Sense; Unbreakable; The Visit) it's a treat for genre fans. But too often his stubborn refusal to
collaborate with screenwriters who might take his ideas to another level
results in movies that spend 90 minutes collapsing before your
eyes.
His latest, Trap, falls somewhere in the M. Night middle ground. It boasts as enticing
a premise as he's ever devised, and for about half of its run time it's
undeniably fun. But in its second half the absence of a more natural
screenwriter is all too telling as it loses its tight focus. It also
becomes derailed by one of the most misjudged casting choices in quite
some time.
The setup is a doozy though. Handsome and charming firefighter Cooper
(Josh Hartnett) attends a pop concert with his tween daughter
Riley (Ariel Donoghue). The gig is headlined by Lady Raven, who
is played by Shyamalan's daughter Saleka, a talented singer
whose work on her father's TV show Servant I greatly enjoyed. Cooper has a likeably goofy relationship with
his kid and seems like a decent sort of bloke. But then he heads to the
bathroom and checks his phone, where he's monitoring a live feed of a
young man chained in what looks like a basement. When Cooper starts to
notice an unusually excessive police presence he's informed by a mouthy
merch seller (Jonathan Langdon) that the police have learned an
infamous serial killer known as "The Butcher" is attending the concert
and so have set a trap to ensure he can't leave the venue. The police
sting is lead by FBI profiler Josephine Grant (Hayley Mills, who
knows a thing or two about setting traps for parents), who is introduced
and talked up in a manner that suggests she's set to play a greater role
in the narrative than she actually does.
Trap's first half focusses on Cooper's attempts to find a way out of the
venue, relying heavily on his Ted Bundy-esque disarming charm to wrap
people unwittingly around his finger. There's an element of bedroom farce
to how Shyamalan structures this, with Cooper juggling checking in on his
daughter and trying not to rouse her suspicions while he dodges the
authorities and tries to avoid the annoying mother of a girl Riley has
recently fallen out with. Hartnett is sensational, balancing charisma with
menace while simultaneously conveying Cooper's genuine love for his
daughter. There's a moment where we watch Cooper's face as he looks at
Riley and Hartnett's expression gives us the impression that this
sociopath is only just now realising the effects his actions will have on
the rest of her life if he's caught. It's a revelatory performance that
should give Hartnett the career reboot he's been chasing for quite some
time now. The warm daddy-daughter dynamic goes a long way to convincing
the audience that we should be rooting for a man we're told has butchered
numerous victims.
Hitchcock was naturally gifted at making us root for terrible people, and
Shyamalan telling us within minutes that Cooper is a mass murderer is
similar to how Rope opens with a pair of fiends killing their friend and yet we spend
the ensuing movie fearing they might get caught. That's until the final
moments when Jimmy Stewart scolds us all for being complicit in a
cinematic crime. The mistake Shyamalan makes here is that he reminds us
too early that we've been rooting for the villain by switching the focus
from Cooper to Lady Raven and asking us to step into her shoes for the
second half.
What makes this so difficult is the gulf in quality between Hartnett and
Saleka's performances. The latter is a fine singer and is convincing as a
beloved pop star when she's confined to the arena's stage, but once she's
required to pull off some dramatic acting it's frankly embarrassing, a
bring your daughter to work day gone badly wrong. Her one-note performance
completely fails to convey the emotional journey Lady Raven finds herself
going through in a short space of time, and there are unwanted shades of
Sofia Coppola in Godfather III, or Cody Horn, the Disney exec's daughter who stank up Magic Mike before quickly fading from the industry.
Shyamalan also makes the same mistake Wes Craven made with Red Eye, that of abandoning the single location setup that initially sucked us
in and opening the film out to more conventional terrain. But what really
dogs Trap's second half is the amount of plot contrivances that just don't hold up
to scrutiny. There are minor twists that immediately cause us to think
about their improbability at best, their impossibility at worst, and there
are decisions made by characters that are simply baffling. It all ends
with a sequel-baiting closing twist that simultaneously reminds us why we
enjoyed the first half of the movie while causing us to mourn Shyamalan's
inability to sustain those early thrills for the entirety of his
film.
Trap is on UK/ROI VOD now.
