Spoilers for this singularly ridiculous film.
There’s no way to talk about what’s wrong with Trap, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest cinematic endeavor, without getting into the nitty-gritty of Trap. If you’re looking for a spoiler-free review, here it is. Is Trap good? No. Is Josh Hartnett extremely watchable anyway? Yes. Is the original music written and performed by Saleka Shyamalan, Night’s daughter, any good? Eh.
Now, let’s get into what works about Trap (Josh Hartnett), and what doesn’t (pretty much everything else).
Hartnett stars as Cooper, a middle-aged, middle-class dad who sprung for concert tickets for his daughter’s favorite pop girlie, Lady Raven, because she’s doing well in school. Cooper appears aggressively normal, his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue), is notable for her normality, too. This is not a super special movie family, Cooper and Riley are indulging in what will probably be their most terrific father-daughter night out for the next couple of years, at least. Shyamalan has a knack for these kinds of tangible family details, even when the rest of his film inevitably spins out of control, one thing you never doubt is that Cooper loves his daughter, and Riley adores her dad, even if he is a big dork. Which he is. Cooper is a huge dork.
Hartnett’s performance is stellar. Rooted in Hartnett’s own mystique of a once-upon teen idol, Cooper suggests a guy who peaked in high school, but is content with his lot in his life, most especially with his kid, whom he clearly enjoys. But upon arriving at the Lady Raven concert, Cooper notices a conspicuous police presence at the arena, and quickly that dorky dad exterior begins fracturing into something more manic and unhinged. At first, Hartnett’s performance seems uneven and even unsure, but that’s just Shyamalan’s famously terrible dialogue—it’s as bad as it’s ever been in Trap. When relying on his own body and face to convey Cooper’s inner life and conflict, though, Hartnett excels as a rat caught in a trap and desperately gnawing on his own leg while anxiously telling his kid he’s fine, he’s fine, everything’s fine.
It's always a strange thing in Shyamalan’s films, he’s not a bad director of actors, but he writes dialogue so preposterous it challenges even the best actors to make sense of his word salad. Hartnett is game, though, and despite being an actual serial killer, has us rooting for Cooper to find a way out. Oh yeah, Cooper is a serial killer called “the Butcher”, and the Lady Raven concert is being used as a sting operation to catch him. The film makes no secret of this, it’s acknowledged right away that Cooper is the bad guy. We should want him to be caught! He’s actively torturing a guy and preparing to murder him! Yet the film succeeds in making Cooper’s plight compelling, which is mostly due to Hartnett’s appeal as an actor.
What doesn’t work about Trap is everything around Hartnett. There’s the dialogue, which is eye-wateringly terrible. There’s the way the whole film stops to focus on Lady Raven, played by Shyamalan’s daughter, Saleka, killing the momentum of Cooper’s cat and mouse situation, and the way Lady Raven is improbably brought into the third act. Not content to use Trap as a proof-of-concept video for Saleka’s pop music career, Shyamalan also makes it her acting reel. She’s not even a bad actress! But Raven has no business being involved in the finale of the film. You know the exact moment Shyamalan sets his own premise on fire in order to accommodate his daughter having more dialogue, and it makes Trap worse. He’s Godfather III’ing his own daughter! Don’t make this mess Saleka’s fault! She was doing perfectly fine as background to the action!
Also, the film itself looks bad, which is increasingly a problem with Shyamalan. It makes no sense, because he is famous for meticulously storyboarding every shot before production, and here he is working with cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, the go-to cinematographer for Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Luca Guadagnino. The same man who brought us a tennis ball’s POV, and also lensed Ron Howard’s appropriately claustrophobic Thirteen Lives, somehow cannot make Hamilton’s First Ontario Centre, a 20,000 seat arena, look as big as one of Taylor Swift’s 60,000 seat tour stops. The man who showed us what it’s like to be a tennis ball and to feel our way through an underwater cave somehow, despite storyboarding this film TWICE, can’t make a dark smaller place look like a dark bigger place. What happened?!
It's the kind of technical issue that has come to haunt Shyamalan in his later era, not unlike his ever-worsening dialogue. I can actually forgive the Lady Raven stuff because Shyamalan is obviously proud of his daughter, and there is a thematic thread of parental anxiety throughout Trap that makes meta hash out of Shyamalan’s own daughter starring in the film, but the sheer ugliness of Trap is baffling. There are moments that are supposed to be ugly, when Cooper’s façade is cracking, and an unattractive frame highlights that internal dissonance. But there are elements that are supposed to look good, like the Lady Raven concert, and they just don’t. So many of Shyamalan’s later films feel rushed, like they needed more time in scripting, and even though he storyboards so much, they somehow still need more effort in physical production. Trap is probably the worst of the recent lot, unlike Old, it doesn’t have pandemic limitations as an excuse.
But Josh Hartnett almost holds it all together. He gets through the worst of the dialogue without completely ruining his performance, he turns the better moments into great ones. Yes, the twist at the end—which is barely a twist by Shyamalan standards—makes me fear another Shyamalan team-up film a la Glass, but not unlike James McAvoy’s role in the Shyamalan Cinematic Universe, I wouldn’t mind seeing more of Hartnett playing in this sandbox. I would LOVE if it he got better dialogue and Shyamalan’s films didn’t end up looking so cheap, but even knowing Shyamalan is unlikely to change on either score, I’m still willing to revisit Cooper down the line. Ditto for Hayley Mills as profiler Dr. Josephine Grant. Casting the star of The Parent Trap as an FBI agent literally trapping a parent. Cute.
Trap is now playing exclusively in theaters.
