From a purely creative standpoint, 2024 has been something of a productive year for the Shyamalan clan. Earlier in the year, M. Night’s younger daughter, Ishana, made her feature directorial debut with the atmospheric The Watchers which her father dutifully produced and now his other, RnB singer songwriter daughter, Saleka, us the lynchpin of his new, tricksy thriller, Trap, that sees Josh Hartnett’s serial killer trying to escape a massive sting operation being held at a concert.
By Shyamalan’s own admission, the whole reason Trap exists is because he wanted to give his daughter her very own big screen concert movie which kind of makes this the second stop on 2024s Crazy Shyamalan Nepotism Tour which is amusing considering he tried to help Will and Jaden Smith try to do the exact same thing with 2013s After Earth with disastrous results. Considering that the filmmaker is probably in the most unpredictable era of his career, can this act of cinematic fatherly love aid him on delivering a riveting experience?
Cooper Adams seems to be the perfect patriarch. Not only does he have an upstanding job as a Philadelphia firefighter and a loving family, but he’s also an extremely attentive father too and this is shown by the fact that he’s about to endure the living hell of taking his daughter to a concert. The concert in question is for Lady Raven, an RnB star whose star power apparently makes the likes of Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga seem more like Peter Andre in comparison, but Cooper seems more than happy to endure the screams of thousands of teenage girls if it makes his Riley happy.
However, after arriving, finding their seats and getting appropriately excited as the lights go down, Cooper can’t help but notice the rather excessive amount of of police presence that’s in the stadium tonight as cops and heavily armed SWAT teams are lined up all over the place and his suspicions are already on high alert and after a bit of good-natured questioning he discovers what’s going on.
It seem that the cops have got wind that the Butcher, a worryingly prolific serial killer whose been leaving chopped up bodies all over Philadelphia, is attending Lady Raven’s concert and the show is now one big trap designed to ensare him as people are being stopped, search and questioned at random intervals, which leaves Cooper in a bit of a bind. Why? Oh, didn’t I tell you? Cooper is the Butcher and he has some poor soul chained up in the basement of a safe house somewhere who he’s planning to suffocate and then dismember at a later date. But to do that, he’s not only going to have to try and avoid a stadium full of cops, he’s going to have to do it all without his beloved Riley finding out about his ghoulish, extracurricular activities. Who’d be a serial killing father, eh?
Ok, so if I’m being honest, I actually find the whole nepotism thing that Shyamalan is doing this year rather sweet and considering that Trap really is a daddy/daughter movie at its truest level, it actually fits the movie rather well. It’s also somewhat refreshing that the legendary twist-meister has decided to drop the whole “astounding rug pull at the end” thing for Trap in order to focus more on the Hitchcockian shenanigans that the increasingly desperate Cooper has to resort to if he’s ever going to escape. Usually, a movie that contains a hefty twist requires the audience to be two or three whole steps behind the movie in order to be properly bamboozled, but here, Shyamalan nicely flips the script and thrusts us a good five or six steps ahead of anyone in the film by pairing us up with Josh Hartnett’s charismatically intense antagonist. It’s an exhilarating feeling being on the flip side of a Shyalaman “experience” (apparently he doesn’t make movies now – no, now they’re experiences), knowing full well what’s going on while everyone else is painfully oblivious and its something of a great change of pace for a filmmaker who often has harmed his own stories by bending over backwards to keep us in the dark.
Also, it helps that the whole making-a-concert-movie-for-his-daughter thing doesn’t interfere too much with the thriller aspect and to be fair, the two blend pretty well as if Brian DePalma had overseen Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, even though the rigors of shooting in such a huge environment means that the director’s more thoughtful style of cinematography is simplified to something noticably more standard.
However, chiefly responsible for making Trap work as well as it does is the welcome return of Josh Hartnett who seems to be having an utter blast portraying the abnormally controlled Cooper and while the movie thankfully stops just short of making him cheer worthy, he’s still surprisingly fun to be around as he desperately tries to figure a way out of his predicament by the most outlandish means. His little tics and grimly ironic asides to people who are blissfully ignorant that he’s an utter nutcase are genuinely funny and you wonder at times if Shyamalan and Hartnett aren’t trying to make the world’s most elaborate farce as you seem to expect Cooper to break the fourth wall at any second to address us with a sudden “am I right, folks”.
However, as fun as this all is – and it is genuinely fun – some of Shyamalan’s well documented habits soon start creeping through that stop the film short of being truly great. For example, the stylised dialogue that the writer/director uses isn’t exactly what you’d call naturalistic and sometimes sits awkwardly with the thriller aspect – also, those of you who demand minimal potholes with their movie will be incensed that the director utilizes coincidence, luck and vast amounts of plot armour to get Cooper from A to B. Now this doesn’t bother me personally (doesn’t Indiana Jones and James Bond fo the exact same shit?), but this recent trend of people dismissing anything that’s even remotely far fetched makes me feel that some will hurl the “lazy writing” accusation at it when we’re only meant to be having fun.
However, the longer Trap goes and the further it gets from it’s original premise, the weaker its grip becomes and Shyamalan’s greatest weakness – that of overegging a climax to the point where you’re begging for it to end – ultimately reaches the point where silly lurches into full on absurdity. While it doesn’t fluff the landing as badly as, say, Old, it still has that feeling that it’s about a good twenty minutes longer than it should be.
Still, for those that simply want their thrillers to just thrill with no real demands on realism, Trap reveals itself to be pretty fun to be ensnared in – but it doesn’t quite snap shut as cleanly as its director hopes.
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