Trap

Starring: Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Hayley Mills, Saleka Shyamalan, Alison Pill, Kid Cudi, Jonathan Langdon

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Cooper (Hartnett) and his daughter Riley (Donoghue) are excited to see Riley's favorite singer, pop sensation Lady Raven (Shyamalan), live in concert. Once inside, Cooper starts to notice a larger than usual police presence and that they are guarding all the exits. Soon, Cooper learns from helpful employee Jamie (Langdon) that the police have learned that the serial killer dubbed "The Butcher" will be in attendance and that this concert is a trap to catch him. This is alarming to Cooper but not in the way one might expect, as it turns out that Cooper is the one the police are after. Cooper must now find out a way to escape the stadium without being caught and try to outwit Dr. Grant (Mills), the profiler who will stop at nothing to catch him.

Shyamalan is a very inconsistent director who frequently likes to torch whatever goodwill he has established to the ground. At the start of his career, he came out strong with The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs before losing credibility with Lady in the Water, The Last Airbender, and After Earth (wow, he tanked harder than even I realized). He then returned to audiences' good graces with The Visit, Split, and Knock at the Cabin and has now followed that up with this film. Sprinkled in between are some of his more polarizing films like The Village, Glass, and Old.

Shyamalan is a master at an intriguing set up, gets great casts for his movies, and his movies often make for great trailers. However, he often doesn't know what to do with the stories he sets up, relies too heavily on a twist ending, often gets campier than necessary performances to keep audiences engaged, and can't resist making a pretentious cameo (often in an important role). It is this slide into pretentious filmmaking that lost him a lot of fans during his freefall into director's jail.

This movie was wild to me and will fall into the more polarizing category, as it represents the best and worst of Shyamalan as a director. Once again, he nails the set up. Described by the director himself as a "Hitchcockian thriller set during a Taylor Swift concert," I was sold on the film before even seeing a trailer. However once we dive into this premise, the film isn't as suspenseful as you would expect, considering that despite the main character being in a seemingly inescapable situation. Cooper never feels like he is in danger of actually being caught and often moves in very suspicious ways. For as many cameras as the SWAT team has set up, it's crazy no one catches on to what Cooper is doing. It also rushes to get through the concert portion of the film and the second half of the movie feels like a completely different movie and tone.

Despite running a lean hour and forty five minutes, the movie doesn't know when to quit and features multiple endings. There were a couple times I thought the movie was going to wrap up, only to keep going. Even The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King couldn't really pull off multiple endings without eliciting eyerolls. If you haven't bought into the movie by this point, it won't win you over with its neverending finale.

What really keeps the film afloat is Josh Hartnett, who seems to have been having a blast playing against type as a murderous psychopath. His energy throughout the film channels Patrick Bateman in the "Hey Paul!" scene from American Psycho where he sings and dances to Huey Lewis and the News. It's pure camp and I loved it despite his character never appearing as smart as we are told he is. Saleka Shyamalan has a bigger role than I was expecting as well. She wrote all the songs Lady Raven sings in the film and while I felt she was miscast at first, she really comes alive and turns in a great performance once she gets involved in the plot post concert. Yes, she is Shyamalan's daughter and some might feel like her involvement is a spot of nepo casting. They may be right but it's much less distracting than if they had actually cast a known musician in the role.

The movie is kind of a mess but it's a very watchable mess that I honestly enjoyed. The reason this ends up falling into the polarizing category for me is because it's hard to tell if the humor and tone was intentional or not. Shyamalan is many things, but he isn't really known for his sense of humor. While he does like deconstructing genre (i.e. the aforementioned equally polarizing Glass), maybe a rewatch will help clear things up, because the person sitting next to me consistently laughed out loud the entire movie.

If this review seems all over the place, it echoes the film I just watched. It's not bad, but it's also not good. Regardless of the issues, I don't think Shyamalan hasn't spent all of the good will he has built up, with me at least, and I will absolutely be there for the next movie he makes with an intriguing but squandered premise.

Grade: C+