NATHAN WEINBENDER:
M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap has an intriguing pressure-cooker premise, a gutsy and unpredictable central performance, an eye-catching look and a plot that’s so underbaked it’s practically raw in the middle. In that sense, it’s quintessential Shyamalan—he’s such a confident stylist but such an inconsistent storyteller, so often stumbling in the final lap. Trap doesn’t exactly fall apart before it’s over. It just kind of… stops.
But it pulls us in from the start, and if you don’t know what the movie is about, this description will no doubt hook you. Josh Hartnett plays Cooper Adams, a Pennsylvania firefighter who’s taking his teenage daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to an arena concert of her favorite pop star. Cooper is an unusually observant guy: Once he and Riley settle into their seats, he starts to notice an overwhelming police presence in the venue, including a SWAT team posted up right outside.
He puts on his charming dad routine and starts to ask around. Turns out the concert is actually an FBI sting operation designed to catch a demented serial killer known as the Butcher, which is bad news for Cooper, who has his next victim chained up in a basement somewhere.
The scenes inside the arena are a lot of pulpy fun, as Cooper manipulates his way into employees-only areas, onto the roof and even backstage without raising any eyebrows. The whole thing requires some major leaps in logic, but we go along with it because it’s so tightly paced and is photographed with great verve by Luca Guadagnino’s regular cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom.
But this is only the first hour of Trap, and once the film leaves the concert venue, it loosens its white-knuckle grip and slowly grinds to a halt. These later scenes concern the pop star, who’s called Lady Raven and is played by Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka (she wrote and performed all the movie’s original songs). Her involvement in the plot really strains credibility, and although Saleka is convincing as a Top 40 hitmaker, she’s not much of an actress yet.
There’s also the matter of the veteran criminal profiler on the Butcher’s scent. She’s played by the great Hayley Mills, and while it doesn’t make much sense that a person in their late 70s would be leading a case of this importance, it’s terrific to see Mills in her first major motion picture in years. Unfortunately, Shyamalan barely involves her in the action: We mostly see her from afar, and while it seems like her involvement might be tied to Cooper’s unresolved feelings about his elderly mother, that connection is never made. It’s really a waste of her presence.
But it’s Hartnett who really gets to walk away with Trap. He has also been scarce on the big screen as of late, and I was surprised how convincing he is as a gleaming-eyed sociopath. It’s a hoot watching him shift his vocal inflection or adjust his posture to change persona and manipulate people into unwittingly help him evade capture. He’s really ripping into this material and turns out to be, somewhat unexpectedly, an ideal conduit for Shyamalan’s unusual dialogue, which has always had an uncanny slant to it. It’d be great to see him in another Shyamalan film—hopefully one with a better ending.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM here on KPBX.