It's a

TRAP

2024

Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

Spoilers: moderate

I have a worry that using the phrase, "the ending is miserable," would give the wrong impression about how I feel about this latest M. Night Shyamalan film, the serial killer thriller Trap, that if I used it, I'd be accidentally be telling you the ending is really stupid and ludicrous—that, I don't know, he's already dead and in Hell, and everyone he meets is the ghost of one of his victims, or something to that effect.  There's not really a script-flipping twist like that to Trap, yet I very nearly wish there were, something truly absurd that would take the movie out with a quick gaudy bang, rather than a series of increasingly soft whimpers each more labored than the last.  See, if I said, "the endingS are miserable," maybe that would get my point across better.  The good news is that it doesn't make it difficult to discuss in a "moderate spoiler" kind of review, because it can be described from a mostly structural standpoint, rather than gesturing vaguely at the plot content and saying "my God, is that ever so fucking dumb."  The bad news is that this downplays how dumb the last third very much remains, because it is still dumb in quiet, scene-by-scene ways, just not in ways that wreck the movie all at once.

Also, yes, the first two-thirds are dumb, too, but giddily so—openly and proudly so—and if you can't handle Trap's premise, maybe thrillers aren't the genre for you.  It does need you to agree that this sounds like a fun idea: in Philadelphia, there is a serial killer, the Butcher, and while our murderer is first revealed in a way that I think would be a tad disorienting if you somehow went into this completely cold, the movie (fairly enough) assumes that you've seen its world-class trailer and you accordingly know exactly why you're here, which is to watch as that murderer, family man Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett), escorts his loser friendless daughter Riley (Ariel Donaghue) to a big pop concert being headlined by big pop star Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan) that, unbeknownst to Cooper, has been transformed into what you might call a trap for the Butcher, because the one piece of hard intelligence the cops have managed to get on him is that he bought some tickets and is, presumably, escorting his kid.  Yeah, it's insane, and even gets slightly moreso.  Despite the operation being overseen by a famed FBI profiler (Haley Mills, of, ahem, 1961's The Parent Trap, making it difficult not to suspect this was Shyamalan's first and last reason for hiring the septuagenarian to recite his characteristically difficult-to-recite exposition), it's actually never once clear how they have any fix on this guy, particularly because he seems like that unusual kind of serial killer who combines a completely random selection of victims with an austere precision in his methods.  Not that it matters how they did; it's only going to be worse when they eventually start to explain it.

The point, obviously, is to put this affable giant with a deadly secret into a box that he can't escape, and then watch as he either escapes anyway, or simply decides to just fuck shit up in a blaze of glory on his way out, and they've put him in a cage with thousands of potential victims, and the trailer sure makes it seem like he's going to opt for the latter.  There are two things that are simultaneously true about Trap, then: the longer initial phase of the film, where this is actually what's happening onscreen, is terrific; and the marketing that sold us on this experience is traipsing right up the border of genuine misrepresentation about what the film entails, and if one was excited about the ultraviolent antisocial freakshow, nearly every single act of surreptitious violence that Cooper pursues once he realizes he's walked into this trap is already in the trailer, and the movie still has something like half an hour left to go after the concert's over, none of which involves even the potential for the kind of Phantom of the Opera-style, "large crowd placed at extreme risk by America's dumbest cops* and one charismatic madman" guignol we were promised.  And then you've got that PG-13 rating clamping down on things even more, though I kind of think working within those PG-13 strictures was still very possible, and perhaps even preferable, given that the pleasures this type of film offers should be pitched—predominantly—as a live-action cartoon, even if the film is pretending to take itself seriously.

That's even if the film we have is pretending to take itself seriously, and I'm not sure Trap gets quite that far with it, which I mean as a compliment to its writer and director: for its long first phase, it's more like it's pretending to pretend, if you'll permit that to make sense, and allowing us to cozy up real intimately with this monster whom it invites us to laugh with as he bamboozles a world of idiots, as well as laugh at when he gets stymied by happenstance or his own conceitedness or his social obligations, mostly to his daughter but also to acquaintances he happens to run into.  (There's a very excellent bit involving the mom of Riley's ex-friend, that captures all the quotidian annoyance of that kind of interaction but with the heightened dizziness of "what if you were, also, in a secret fight for your life while she was bugging you?")  It's basically Rope, Alfred Hitchcock's greatest accomplishment, with the exact same perverse intention of aligning the audience so totally with the concerns of a remorseless psychopath that you want him to keep succeeding because it's a vicarious delight when he does and that delight would end the first time he failed, except Rope's pair of murderers are now the same guy, with that film's smooth, unflappable reptile in a human mask and its psychologically disintegrating creep combining into one really wonderful creation.

I've arguably buried the lede on this, because it is what most people are talking about with Trap, and of course they'd have to.  M. Night Shyamalan is not, as is very well-attested, a director of actors.  Josh Hartnett's enduring reputation, at least, is that he isn't much of an actor in the first place.  I have some doubts, because hot guy backlash is a real phenomenon and I'm almost completely unaware of his 21st century filmography, so all I have to go on are his training wheels performances from decades ago, but I can't help it: I'm too fond of the idea of an irresistibly awkward force colliding with an immovably unemotive object and getting such wonderfully unpredictable results.  The upshot is Hartnett is great: the Shyamalan touchstone is probably Mark Wahlberg in The Happening, but just wait, hear me out.  Wahlberg in The Happening is, for completely inexplicable reasons, playing "a normal guy" that way, with oddball flutey line reads and doofus-like expressions, all of which were aimless and without good purpose.  Hartnett is less embarrassing, for starters, but more than that he's playing "Mark Wahlberg in The Happening" as a cover identity, emphasizing how utterly abnormal he is, so that Cooper is a mockery of human socialization (including all the parts where he somewhat unrealistically charms his way into information), effectively saying "this is what I think normal is, this is how lame you are, this is how easy it is to trick you," and he and Shyamalan have found a way to make his black eyes crackle with dark fire behind this anodyne mask.  At the same time, he figures out he's the quarry quick, and so he's also required to play, simultaneously, the clever, commanding criminal mastermind and basically a single feature-long "AAAAAAAAAAAA" inside his head that he can never voice, and can only communicate with his expressions.  The other side of this coin is that the supporting performances would be worse if they felt human.  But Hartnett's the center, giving a tremendously compelling turn that, even in the absence of anything else Shyamalan was doing, would single-handedly lift the entire movie into "overt comedy," and it's an incredibly funny one, Hartnett coming perilously close to acknowledging the existence of the camera filming him.  I am happy to report that he kept me laughing through the whole... well, the whole majority of it is the half-hearted praise I'm going to have to give him.

If I were to take a more jaundiced view—and ultimately and with great regret, that's the view we're gonna have to take—Hartnett is really only salvaging the first two-thirds of the film, which can hit that one note very well but can never really escalate.  There's a lot to like about those first two-thirds nonetheless, starting with Shyamalan and editor Noemi Preiswerk putting it together with a great deal of snap, and the producer-director marshaling an admirable physical production on behalf of a film that only cost $30 million; I'm sure there's plenty of digital set extension for the far reaches of the concert, but this is a shockingly crowded movie for 2024, that feels very much like it takes place at a concert, bustling with extras and making solid use of the space of an arena for agoraphobic thrills.  (It's not as good as Snake Eyes, a movie Shyamalan should have watched over and over and over until he fixed the problems that eventually take hold of his movie, but that it got me to compare the two, or think of Shyamalan as aspiring towards De Palma, can't be considered a negative.)  Shyamalan got big-deal cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and he's executing some fine, fine work, frequently confronted with the challenge of an arena lit mostly by stage lights that he and Shyamalan are using more as an opportunity, both for letting Hartnett stew in darkness and for bathing him in motivated, or motivated-enough, solid colors, especially those hell-reds they deploy in a long close-up, while the actor lets his inner ham loose, twitching and sweating all over the frame.  I should say that, of course, it's stage lights and a zillion cellphones, and that image of Hartnett being the only person in a sea of hundreds not looking at a cellphone is testament to Shyamalan as a storyteller, with one wordless shot managing to get you to cleave to the multiple murderer because he's the only person at this concert, that he doesn't even really want to be at, who isn't lost in the void, distracted by the apparent necessity to record an experience rather than actually live it.  It's not exactly "social commentary"—I mean, it's not at all—but it does say "look at these dorks, this isn't real and we're not even forwarding these potential victims as such, so do you actually care what happens to them as long as it's exciting to watch?"  It's the kind of irresponsibility one goes to the movies for in the first place.

And so, with frequent recourse to Cooper scamming and skulking—I love his interaction with the police, and the minor terrorist act he effects—the main thing holding the first phase of the film back is Shyamalan, which is to say Saleka Shyamalan, and I have to admit to having... no particular feelings one way or another about the way Trap was conceived, from the ground up, as a present from M. Night to Saleka, except with minor misgivings about the notion of a dad paying hundreds of people to pretend that his daughter is the world's greatest pop singer, which does seem gauche no matter how you slice it.  Shyamalan pere paid for the majority of this movie, so I'm not really enthusiastic to condemn it on this basis because it's his money and that's our stupid economic system; but Shyamalan fille is not giving anybody an excuse to condone it.  I only hoped she wouldn't be an active impediment, and, you know, she's not, really—which is to say, her music is not—but it is some weak tea as the backdrop for a nervy thriller, neither good nor bad enough to pull attention, and it did not awaken any particular musicality in her father's filmmaking soul, so despite a great deal of screentime technically devoted to S. Shyamalan's music and performances, all of these scenes are still always about Hartnett.  Which isn't the worst way this could've gone down, I know, but if this movie were meant to be a big advertisement for his daughter's pop career, M. Night Shyamalan had a funny and marvelously passive-aggressive way to start it off, the story's own father-daughter duo arriving in downtown Philadelphia with the latter singing her teen head off to a Saleka song, pausing to suggest that she could be a singer, too, whereupon her father replies, "Yeah, sure!" in the first flash of the fooling-nobody-but-the-people-in-this-movie contempt that's going to be such a wonderful fixture of Hartnett's performance.

It does not follow that it'd be fair to blame S. Shyamalan for the film flying off into oblivion even though her dad's screenplay also made her the hinge upon which it turns; without going into any detailed spoilers, the concert, as all concerts do, ends, and S. Shyamalan is basically the recipient of a full-on protagonist shift, taking over from Hartnett (more accurately, they become deuteragonists in conflict), and this is incredibly weird but also one of the most false-footed major structural gambits I've ever seen a movie try, because it doesn't even fucking take.  I'm going to throw this out there: maybe the heroine who eventually arises to challenge Murder Dad is, cough, his daughter, whom we've been with the whole film?  Does that not seem slightly more natural?  Riley practically vanishes, and even Lady Raven is replaced, functionally speaking, with Riley's mom (Alison Pill), whose first appearance in this movie happens at around the 80 minute mark.

But it is here that this movie, which I'd been enjoying, just falls over and dies.  It's difficult to describe how different the movie that takes its place is, though a useful token for the change is that, prompted by our profiler's observation that a supervillain of such fastidiousness as Cooper probably has OCD, Hartnett is very suddenly obliged to start doing silly Movie OCD business, like make sure towels hang the same distance from the ground, in ways that had not informed his performance previously at all (and, credit to the actor, would've been annoying and distracting if they had!).  Then the movie ends, about four or five times in a row, in a way that feels like it's just repeating the same Goddamn scene over and over again with minor variations.  For several minutes it seems like it won't ever end, once we get sucked into the black hole of a "this wasn't a bleak comedy romp at all, no, it's a legitimate psychological thriller" conversation, which is so unexpected and jarring that I'd be willing to declare it the worst "twist" of Shyamalan's career.  Hartnett has heretofore made some heroic efforts to maintain the humor of his performance (there's a bit where his wife discusses the Butcher's reputation and he's wriggling his eyebrows at S. Shyamalan that's complete comedic dynamite), but at this juncture we at last do learn what happens when irresistible forces and immovable objects collide.

That's certainly the point of no return, and now we're in a movie that's no longer pretending to pretend it's taking itself seriously in order to give you jolts of shameful joy, but is just straight-up taking itself seriously—an impossible task after the 80 preceding minutes of nonsense—and I can't comprehend how it happened.  Self-seriousness is a Shyamalan trait, that goes without saying—sometimes it's even one of his strengths—but even he couldn't make the first phase of this movie so consistently self-puncturing by accident, he obviously meant to do it that way, so why would he change gears?  Maybe I should've expected this from the maker of Split; maybe it doesn't matter why.  The bottom line is it doesn't work, and it comes horribly close to ruining the first phase along with it.  Whatever else it does, it highlights the weaknesses that the unfolding pleasures of the first phase had previously concealed; suddenly, it becomes very clear how little in the way of "actual thriller setpieces" there were in this movie, even when it was good, and how little cleverness Shyamalan was bringing to this thriller as a writer.  This was fine when we had Hartnett's coolly-chaotic performance, and Cooper's step-by-step plans to delay the inevitable felt like they were preparing us for something, but then we learn they were preface to... nothing.  I can't, or at least I refuse to, call Trap "bad," because the first hour-plus is the best and most consistent hour-plus of movie that Shyamalan's delivered in literal decades, and I want to continue to treasure the tightly-controlled hysteria of it.  But it's real hard: the last third isn't even "bad Shyamalan," it's just dead air entirely.

Score: 6/10

*It may have been inspired by it, but this isn't really that much like Operation Flagship.  It is also a good thing for Trap (and the world, more generally) that ISIS was recently unsuccessful at blowing up Taylor Swift and/or a bunch of Swifties, Ariana Grande-in-Manchester style.