25 Years of M. Night Shyamalan: A Review of “Trap”
25 years after he broke into the mainstream with The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan remains a fascinating filmmaker – bursting with creative and bold ideas that only occasionally turn into good movies. His latest, the serial-killer-stuck-at-a-pop-concert thriller Trap, goes for something a bit more fast-paced and heightened in tone than we’re used to from the director of Unbreakable, Split, and Old. And for about two-thirds of its 105-minute run time, it’s a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the hunt for the murderer known as The Butcher spirals out of control into an absolute mess of a third act.
This decidedly high-concept film stars Josh Hartnett as Cooper Adams, a firefighter who takes his young teenage daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to see her favorite singer, Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan). Except Cooper also happens to be The Butcher – and, as indicated by the massive number of police in attendance, the entire concert happens to be a trap intended to identify and apprehend the notorious serial killer. Much to our delight, this leaves Cooper scrambling to escape the venue without getting caught. It’s an audacious, wonderfully goofy premise, and Shyamalan leans into it. He’s rarely this playful in his films, which – whether they’re good or bad – tend to be rather serious affairs. Seeing Cooper smooth-talking strangers in order to get more information while deftly swiping key cards and walkie talkies to gain an upper hand is really enjoyable.
And it’s all sold well by Hartnett, who seems to be having a ball playing against type. A loving, goofy dad, Cooper has long masked the vicious and cunning killer inside him. Trap initially works by having Cooper juggle both sides of his personality, keeping Riley happy while also constantly scanning for a way out of the arena they’re in. Hartnett does a great job playing a guy whose carefully constructed veneer is so close to being torn down. He gives Cooper just the right manic yet determined feel, and lends the proceedings a nice, darkly comedic edge. And he has a more-than-able scene partner in Donoghue. Shyamalan has always been adept at casting excellent young actors and getting the best out of them – going back to Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense and Abigail Breslin in Signs – a trend that continues here. As Riley, Donoghue gives a natural and endearing performance that creates some emotional stakes for Trap: Cooper is a murderer and clearly deserves to be caught, but if he’s caught, it will destroy this girl’s world.
Does any of this help Shyamalan drop his habit of writing clumsy, decidedly mannered dialogue? No, though it’s not as prevalent as it can be at its worst (I’m looking at you, Old) and there’s almost a reason for it, considering that Cooper himself is putting on a performance. He’s being overly cordial, overly earnest, and overly helpful. This charade, mixed with the winking tone (closer in spirit to Shyamalan’s 2015 comeback, The Visit), defuses a couple of potentially eye-rolling conversations, at least on Cooper’s side of the exchange.
But there are still several notably silly scenes involving a very friendly, very dumb merch-booth guy (Jonathan Langdon) who simply can’t stop telling Cooper vitally important information that’s meant to be a secret. And Trap relies on convenience and coincidence to a laughable extent, as Cooper keeps eavesdropping on a renowned FBI profiler just as she’s saying something she would have doubtlessly gone over with her colleagues long before the concert. The profiler is, amusingly, played by former Disney child star Hayley Mills, whose most famous movie is the original version of The Parent Trap – making her casting feel like a big wink at the audience.
Nonetheless, Trap is quite enjoyable for its first two-thirds. If only Shyamalan could have then delivered a satisfying conclusion. Instead, it feels like he had three or four different ideas for how the movie could end and decided to just include them all, creating a huge jumble in the process. It is bizarre and frustrating how many times Trap feels like it’s launched its big, final-confrontation sequence, only to lead into a sequence that feels like, oh no, this must be how it’s going to end – and then repeat the process over again. There’s a huge shift in perspective in these final scenes, too, which is interesting conceptually but just doesn’t work in execution. As Trap winds down, it suddenly puts a lot of investment into characters we barely know or just met. Worse, it’s at the expense of the characters we’re actually invested in, Cooper and Riley, while throwing in some wild and random curveballs in terms of how certain characters interact with Cooper.
Playing the concert’s Taylor Swift/Olivia Rodrigo-type headliner is Shyamlan’s own daughter, Saleka, who wrote and performed 14 original songs for Trap. The music is unremarkable, but certainly functional in terms of evoking contemporary Top 40, and Saleka Shyamalan is a strong singer and charismatic performer based on what we see of Lady Raven on stage. However, in one-on-one scenes, she’s unfortunately lacking, coming off stilted during some big moments. It doesn’t help that her dad saddled her with one of Trap’s wackier scenes, in which Lady Raven makes quite a reach in how to interact with someone who’s not an international pop star. On the flip side is Alison Pill, who’s great, per usual, but whose character shows up way too late to receive the dramatic significance and focus Shyamalan attempts to give her. Despite Pill’s strong work in her sliver of screentime, this is someone we needed to meet much earlier if she’s meant to be so pivotal to the story.