For a storyteller who’s known for his twists, M. Night Shyamalan’s new film really doesn’t hide its twist at all. I’m usually not great at figuring out twists before they happen, and even I could see Trap’s trap from a mile away. This makes for a film which is difficult to discuss without immediately spoiling it, but I will try my best. I will also try my best to convince you, dear reader, that Trap is worth a watch despite its obvious major flaw. It’s nothing you need to rush out to the theater to see, but it continues Shyamalan’s recent decent streak and marks an incredible comeback for Josh Hartnett.
I can’t remember the last time I saw such a stark case of one actor carrying a film. Hartnett is this movie. Either he’s put all his comeback chips on this particular table, or Shyamalan did so on his behalf, believing that the return of a well-liked but recently down-on-his-luck movie star to a leading role would help sell tickets. In any event, Hartnett should easily be able to capitalize on this performance, because he is outstanding here. To fully describe the performance would be to reveal sensitive plot information, so instead, I’ll just give a brief summary of the film’s premise.
Hartnett plays Cooper Adams, a father taking his teenage daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to see pop star Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan, M. Night’s eldest daughter, a real-life music star in her own right) live in concert. Cooper notices an abnormally large amount of security officers and other such folks in and around the stadium venue. He soon learns from venue staff member Jamie (Jonathan Langdon) that the security has been tipped off that a serial killer known only as “The Butcher” will be in attendance.
From here, Cooper’s concern rises to paranoia. For the most part, Shyamalan avoids writing characters who respond unrealistically to what makes his main character stand out, something which has plagued his bottom-of-the-barrel efforts. Even though I definitely felt like I knew where it was all going (and I was right), it was still a fun ride, with red herrings and MacGuffins galore. In addition, even when its predictability lands with a thud in the third act, Trap still has a few tricks up its sleeve, and those final sequences are effectively tense in most of the right ways.
What Trap gets right from a technical perspective is its use of its unique setting. It’s always finding new places to go within the venue (Toronto’s FirstOntario Centre and Rogers Centre were the primary locations), and within all of these places, new angles and perspectives are constantly being churned through to compliment Cooper’s unease. It genuinely has the power to tie your stomach in knots at certain points, provided you suspend your disbelief and give yourself over to its story.
That suspension of disbelief proves more and more crucial in small but noticeable ways towards the end. There are definitely plot holes to be found, but, as he’s proven in the past, Shyamalan has a way of convincing us of some of his characters’ quickly-drawn motivations and the reality of their physical confrontations, however ludicrous they would be in real life. These are some of his particular brands of movie magic. That magic may not be at full strength here, but there is an undeniable sparkle to Trap that many of his more recent films simply do not have. Hartnett accounts for most of that sparkle, but hey, it was certainly a sparkling idea to cast him in the first place. | George Napper
