'Trap' creates a good, sinister game, then cheats
HANDOUT
We all know our spot on the Shyamalan scale: the amount of far-fetched we can stomach, the line between good-bad and bad-bad, the gap between talented director and garbage writer that we can or can’t quite stretch ourselves across.
But it’s a problem when you rule at ideas and stink at stories, and yet again “Trap” finds writer-director M. Night Shyamalan (“Old,” “The Happening”) demonstrating his skills while falling into self-made holes of nonsense. No matter how much you want to sign up for delicious silliness, it’s hard to be gripped when you keep blurting out, “Yeah, right.”
Josh Harnett (seriously!) stars as Cooper, an ordinary dad who just wants to take his teenage daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to an ordinary Lady Raven (Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka) concert, and those darn feds keep distracting people by blocking the doors and scoping out a serial killer. Except — twist! — Cooper is the killer, which is a fun concept (great trailer for “Trap,” BTW), if you want to spend a while seeing if a deranged murderer can escape (I guess) and also want to consider if a doting father/beloved firefighter/expert chopper of body parts really can exist (not particularly).
In theory, the once-heralded “Sixth Sense” filmmaker has found a way to reverse the notion of the mouse escaping the cat and turn it into the lion escaping the zookeeper. Well, if the lion was on a deadly rampage and knew its actions were wrong, I guess. Never mind, this metaphor doesn’t work, for which I blame a film that also doesn’t work after it concocts a promising thought but hinges on no one noticing anything ever, or always saying the thing that no one would actually say in that situation.
You might think that people tasked with assisting a full-scale effort to catch someone known as “The Butcher” wouldn’t also be competing in some kind of world’s-most-gullible contest. But you also wouldn’t think Shyamalan would cast 78-year-old Hayley Mills, whose voice for me only conjures Miss Bliss, as a brilliant profiler of psychopaths, and then make her look like a dope most of the time.
I know, applying logic or any particular expectation to an M. Night Shyamalan movie isn’t the point, and we should all be thankful he’s emerged from the days of muck like “Lady in the Water” or “After Earth.” Hartnett’s good and creepy in the role and almost makes “Trap,” which is sometimes kinda funny and benefits from being less broadly sociological than other recent efforts, worth seeing just for him. If less than 90% of the movie wasn’t contrived and warping itself to find ways for Cooper to evade capture, Shyamalan might have had something.
Instead he just has an OK showcase for his daughter as a pop star, I guess. And a small role for Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi as The Thinker, because someone has to give things some thought around here.
C+
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