TRAP. The conversation I have been having about M. Night Shyamalan movies for a decade begins with recent disappointment, acknowledges The Sixth Sense (1999), maybe Signs (2002) or Unbreakable (2000), and lands with fingers crossed for the next one. Just as I enjoy being tricked at a magic show, I'm happy to gasp at a twist and not too proud to admit I had no idea it was coming. Those early movies also had good scares, tension and strong enough emotional cores — grief, loneliness, the realization that discovering one's purpose will not necessarily bring happiness — to let a shaky plot point or two slide and suspend a little disbelief. (Not Marky Mark as a science teacher though — even I have my limits.)
Trap, at least in preview form, beckoned less with the director's blue-toned moodiness than the glint of suspense. The main character's big secret already having been revealed in the ads only tantalized — what would the real surprise be? (This is the double-edged sword of branding as an auteur: People expect one to deliver as advertised.) But what seemed like a reverse-heist horror full of possibility yields mostly boredom and embarrassment.
Affably awkward dad Cooper (Josh Hartnett) and daughter Riley head into a Philadelphia stadium to see her idol Lady Raven, a Gaga/Grande-ish pop star (Saleka Shyamalan), along with 20,000 other fans and trailing parents. The crowd is blithely uninterested in the wall of heavily armed cops lining all exits, except for Cooper. We quickly learn when he's not in Girl Dad™ mode, he's abducting, killing and dismembering people as local serial killer known as "the Butcher." He quickly learns the police, SWAT and FBI presence is for him and the whole concert has been arranged to corner and catch him. Cooper must now juggle fatherly bonding, building and security reconnaissance, and planning his escape amid the army of cops, led by a seemingly omniscient FBI profiler (Hayley Mills) who knows all about his mom stuff.
Even putting aside the wild strategy of corralling a mostly teen girl audience with a serial killer of whom there's no firm physical description, Trap has serious problems. First among them is the absence of any tension in what should be a cat-and-mouse thriller. Cooper makes a smooth lift here or there but never pulls off anything cleverer than a messy diversion or a costume change. And his brushes with law enforcement don't feel perilous, requiring little more than a coolish head and a humble excuse. One wonders why he doesn't employ the same aw-shucks demeanor and stroll out with every other dad in the place. Perhaps whoever edited the trailer should have handled the whole movie, as the former signaled a taut escape plot and the latter chugs and drags. The sloppy pacing leads to an awkward shift to a clunky second — third? — act that leaves the audience hoping for the vicarious thrill of at least someone getting out of here.
But the flight response hits hardest in relation to the tragic nepo-baby subplot, when Lady Raven's character steps off the stage and into the action. What seems at first like an indulgence, showcasing one's offspring's talents in the backdrop to the action, expands into resting the back end of the crumbling story on her performance. It's a heavy lift for which neither Saleka Shyamalan nor her formidable lashes are ready. The writing for the part isn't much to work with — Lady Raven never develops beyond two-dimensional perfection and professional contouring — but her delivery is more suited to Instagram than film. It seems impossible that even parental bias could blind a director to the mismatch and even less likely that he hadn't heard of the brutal reviews young Sofia Coppola endured after her father swapped her in for an ill Winona Ryder in The Godfather Part III (1990).
Hartnett deserves credit for bringing an oddball dark humor to the role, such as it is, with his Cooper goofily imitating normal humans, navigating a weird interaction with an aggressive mom and feigning shock at the goings on. But he isn't able to make us care much one way or the other about the killer or his escape beyond how much longer it's all going to drag on. The hints at his childhood and the infallible insights of the profiler are easy tropes, and even his occasional self-awareness is thin. The genius serial killer is a cliché we probably need a break from, but is tracking the moves of a lackluster one any kind of fun?
Neither secrets revealed nor characters outsmarting each other are very exciting, and some of Cooper's moves feel like cheats. By the time the credits roll, red herrings feel like gestures in more interesting directions the movie might have taken. The most unexpected twist may be how long the director's cameo lasts. (Spoiler: too long.) Trap should have been a scary, tense and alive with sudden turns and tight timing. Turns out it was dead the whole time. PG13. 105M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the arts and features editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, extension 320, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Instagram @JFumikoCahill.
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