Somewhere deep inside Trap there’s a good movie bound, gagged and struggling to get out. It might be a grim comedy with something satirical to say about fandoms, drawing the line between the icky fascination with serial killers and shrieky pop idolatry. It could be something straighter and darker; a taut single-location claustro-thriller. Or it might even be closer to a heyday M. Night Shyamalan joint, which takes pride in a good ol’ fashioned rug-pull. But whatever it might be, that good movie never breaks free. Instead, we have an oddly inert wannabe nail-biter that diffuses much of the tension it might have mustered from its neat if improbable premise through a hokily mounted mix of cringe and perplexity.
Much of that cringe arises from Shyamalan’s nepo-tastic decision to cast his daughter Saleka as a Taylor Swift-level popstrel who behaves, and is treated by all, as a divine presence even when she’s not strutting awkwardly around on her eerily empty-looking stage. Lady Raven isn’t just a megastar; she’s a borderline superhero, whose power is sheer charisma (plus a bit of social-media mastery). Even if Saleka were twice the performer her father must believe she is, bless him, she wouldn’t be able to pull that off.
To his credit, Hartnett makes an engaging enough anti-hero.
The perplexity, meanwhile, comes from Shyamalan’s decision to abandon the set-up’s single-location mega-trap promise surprisingly early, for a series of convoluted smaller ambushes, which our psycho-villain protagonist Cooper (Josh Hartnett) must evade to the viewer’s ever-increasing incredulity. Though, in all fairness, when the movie is based in the concert arena, it does start to feel distractingly unlikely that he (and his daughter at times) would spend so much time not watching the damn show.
To his credit, Hartnett makes an engaging enough anti-hero, whose true nature is so not-a-twist it’s given away minutes into the movie (not to mention the trailer). The film’s central trick — lifted, of course, from Hitchcock’s Psycho — is to get its audience behind him during his close-shave escapes, despite the fact he’s a brutal murderer. Shyamalan has a little fun pushing this, as Cooper shoves a girl down some stairs to create a distraction, then later causes an explosion in a kitchen that sprays a young woman with hot oil. As if to say, “You still want him to get free? Even now?”
But it’s not enough to hoist the material to a level that’s truly gripping, or exciting, or fresh. Although fair play to Shyamalan for stunt-casting Hayley Mills — one-time child star of The Parent Trap — as the FBI expert laying the trap for this particular parent.
