Add Category
TRAP ★★★½
(M) 105 minutes
Whatever else might be said of him, M. Night Shyamalan is a family guy. Earlier this year he served as producer of The Watchers, the first film directed by his daughter Ishana Night Shyamalan. Trap, his latest film as writer-director, stars Josh Hartnett as a doting suburban dad accompanying his daughter (Ariel Donoghue) to a daytime stadium concert given by the fictional pop idol Lady Raven, played by Saleka Shyamalan, the director’s niece.
Josh Hartnett plays a loving dad hiding a very dark secret who takes his daughter, played by Ariel Donoghue, to a concert in Trap.
Outwardly, it’s a perfectly innocent event, along Taylor Swift lines but skewing younger, the kind of thing where the star accompanies herself on a grand piano and lectures the crowd about the importance of forgiveness.
But this being a Shyamalan film, all is not as it appears. In fact, the entire concert has been set up as a trap for a local serial killer known as the Butcher (staging a potentially violent showdown in the midst of thousands of screaming teenage fans may not sound ideal, but M. Night has never been one to let plausibility get in the way of a good yarn).
On top of that is another surprise, which I might hesitate to give away except it’s revealed within the first five minutes. So here goes: Hartnett’s character Cooper is the Butcher, discreetly using his phone to keep tabs on his latest terrified victim (Mark Bacolcol), held captive in a basement somewhere in the city.
It’s a morbid scenario played largely for gleeful black comedy, especially in the long section of the film that unfolds during the concert. Knowing that cops are monitoring all the exits, Cooper keeps slipping away searching for an escape route, showing an ingenuity worthy of Bruce Willis in a Die Hard sequel when it comes to swiping a security pass or staging an accident with a deep fryer to cover his tracks.
The joke is that he’s little different from the average bloodthirsty American movie hero (and also, perhaps, that in Shyamalan’s eyes a clean-cut middle-aged white guy can get away with anything). Hartnett, once a teen idol, gives a very funny performance, letting us see the effort it takes for Cooper to arrange his features in an approximation of friendly goodwill.