Trap (2024, dir. M. Night Shyamalan)

by Jack Martin | Aug 11, 2024

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 105 mins

UK Distributor: Warner Bros

UK Release Date: 9 August 2024

WHO’S IN TRAP?

Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Night Shyamalan, Hayley Mills, Alison Pill, Marnie McPhail, Vanessa Smythe, Kid Cudi

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

M. Night Shyamalan (director, writer, producer), Marc Bienstock and Ashwin Rajan (producers), Herdís Stefánsdóttir (composer), Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (cinematographer), Noemi Katharina Preiswerk (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A serial killer (Hartnett) finds himself trapped at a concert…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON TRAP?

As a film critic, it’s my job to lay out as best as I can why a film does or doesn’t work, and whether or not it provides valuable enough entertainment for audiences to enjoy without guilt. However, just because I’ve always got my analytical brain switched on doesn’t mean that I cannot enjoy a dumb movie every now and then. Hell, earlier this year I gave four stars to both Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire and Bad Boys: Ride or Die, and I’m pretty sure that parts of those films were written by inmates in an insane asylum.

With that in mind, I really had a blast with M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, a film which by all accounts is dumber than a bag of rocks but is so earnest in its execution and so enjoyably ridiculous that I was having so much fun basking in the silliness of it all.

Trap is primarily set at a concert venue in Philadelphia, where Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett) is taking his teenage daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to see her favourite singer, the pop star known as Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan), perform live in front of her adoring fans. Cooper notices an unusually high presence of armed police, and eventually learns that the concert is intended as a trap to catch a notorious serial killer known as “the Butcher” whom the cops, along with FBI profiler Dr. Josephine Grant (Hayley Mills), are keeping a close eye out for. The big Shyamalan twist, though, is that Cooper actually IS the Butcher, and so he now must try and find a way to evade the authorities while keeping his identity firmly under wraps – which, given the surprising number of resources available to him, might not be as difficult as it seems on paper, but more on that in a bit.

Let me make one thing clear about Trap: it does not make a lick of sense. There are more holes than an embroidery kit in the central plot, it constantly has characters making the worst mistakes possible in order to move the plot along, and the leaps in logic that it makes so that Hartnett’s anti-hero can stay one step ahead of those trying to capture him are beyond far-fetched.

It’s one of those films where everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, is designed for pure plot convenience, regardless of whether or not it seems like something that would actually happen, even in the many outlandish worlds that Shyamalan has created throughout his career. In most cases, the nonsensical nature of the script alone would be enough for this to be considered an unmitigated disaster, and anyone who comes out of this movie hating it for those reasons alone wouldn’t necessarily be wrong in their thinking.

For me, though, the absolute ridiculousness of it all is what made Trap such an enjoyable experience, even with full knowledge that its foundations are flimsier than a skyscraper made of breadsticks. Like a lot of Shyamalan’s work, particularly his lesser-received films like The Happening or Lady in the Water, there is something oddly endearing about its silliness, to a point where it seems like Shyamalan is entirely aware that he’s not making a completely serious film.

For instance, the filmmaker gets some decent (and intentional) laughs by playing around with the fact that we are seeing this pop concert from the perspective of an adult man, one who’s taken aback by all the loud screaming of the teenage girls surrounding him, and who’s perplexed by all of them recording the concert on their phones instead of living in the moment. There are also moments when you can tell how much Hartnett’s Cooper is under immense pressure to escape his inevitable capture, yet he can still switch on the charm at any given moment in ways that do genuinely make you like the guy – until, of course, he goes full Patrick Bateman in the film’s admittedly scattershot final act.

A lot of that comes from how genuinely great Josh Hartnett is in this movie, for the actor more than understands the assignment of being a complete sociopath under the direction of Shyamalan, and perfectly finds his rhythm within the filmmaker’s trademark idiosyncratic dialogue and awkward camera angles. Hartnett is already a very likeable actor, and between this and Oppenheimer it’s cool to see him have a bit of a mainstream acting resurgence after all these years, but casting him in the role of a menacing and psychologically damaged serial killer is kind of ingenious, because the actor really utilises his natural screen presence in a number of disarming manners.

On top of that, he shares good chemistry with just about anyone he acts opposite of, from young Ariel Donoghue as his teen daughter (to whom he nails the role of a goofy dad who makes corny jokes and attempts to speak teen slang to her embarrassment) to characters who only have a few lines of dialogue in their one or two scenes. A partial shout-out, too, to Saleka Night Shyamalan (who, as you may have guessed, is M. Night’s daughter, and the second this year to make their film debut after Ishana Night Shyamalan came onto the scene with her own feature The Watched) who manages to hold her own in scenes opposite Hartnett, even when he is commanding your attention at all times.

After all that, though, I will not say that Trap is an especially great movie. In fact, among Shyamalan’s recent crop of features, it doesn’t even rank among the top. But even when they carry such grating flaws in their logic and overall conception, M. Night Shyamalan’s films are rarely ever boring, and Trap – as unfathomably dumb as it is – is a hugely entertaining bit of delightful stupidity.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Trap is an enjoyably dumb thriller by M. Night Shyamalan that has fun with its premise and is carried by a genuinely great lead turn from Josh Hartnett, despite its utterly nonsensical script and logic-defying storytelling.