Movie Review: 'Trap' from Director M. Night Shyamalan

Trap (2024)

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan

Written by M. Night Shyamalan

Starring Josh Hartnett, Saleka Shyamalan, Ariel Donaghue, Hayley Mills

Release Date August 2nd, 2024

Published August 2nd, 2024

Trap stars Josh Hartnett as Cooper, a firefighter who also happens to be a serial killer known as The Butcher. As we meet Cooper he is taking his daughter, Riley (Ariel Donaghue), to a concert. Riley is obsessed with a pop star known as Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) and Cooper has secured floor seats for this unusual daytime concert. What Cooper doesn’t know is that this concert is just for him and Riley. Working with the pop star, Police have set a trap for The Butcher. The building is surrounded by cops and they are instructed to investigate any man at the concert that fits the serial killer profile created by Dr. Grant (Hayley Mills).

Cooper cottons onto the con as he observes numerous men being pulled out of their seats by swarms of cops who appear to be everywhere. A friendly t-shirt seller then spills the beans to Cooper about the nature of the show and the plot truly kicks in. Cooper needs to find some way to avoid the cops, keep Riley from noticing that anything unusual is happening, and escape the building as quietly and secretly as possible. Thus, what should unfold is a thrilling game of cat and mouse where Cooper sneaks about outsmarting the cops and the thrill of the chase thrills us in the audience.

Sadly, thrills are lacking in this latest effort from the master of the twist, M. Night Shyamalan. Trap is a stilted, borderline embarrassing effort. The plot makes sense, the pieces are in place for a thriller as I described it but Shyamalan’s bizarre direction of his actors renders the early scenes of Trap such a cringefest that the better parts of the movie are crushed by the weight of his poor choices. Early scenes of Cooper and his daughter are so broadly performed they appear like A.I desperately attempting to mimic human behavior. Everything is over the top, the interaction between Hartnett and young Ariel Donoghue is forced and unrealistic to the point where I wondered if Hartnett had forgotten how to act.

These idealized scenes of daddy-daughter bonding are straight out of an episode of Fuller House or some random Nickelodeon sitcom and have no place in a feature film. I started to expect a laugh track was going to try and convince me to find these early scenes funny. Then, because I want to like M. Night Shyamalan’s work, I tried to convince myself that perhaps this heightened, sitcom-like acting was intended as a counterpoint to the grittier aspects of the movie that would no doubt come later. Indeed, the movie does become less silly and hammy, but not by much and certainly not enough to make it appear that this was part of a larger plan to upend expectations by counterpointing broad silliness with gritty, serial killer realism.

The dialogue in Trap is especially painful in these early scenes as Shyamalan plays out a goofy dad fantasy where Hartnett tries to learn kid lingo and his daughter tries to explain modern slang terms. Doofy dad tries to use slang, daughter cringes. It’s like TikTok was asked to write movie dialogue. Shyamalan even tries his old dad-hand at inventing a slang term and it’s as misguided and unfunny as it sounds. ‘This place is crispy.’ Yup, that’s how kids talk. You know what else kids love? Hayley Mills. You know, Hayley Mills? From The Parent Trap? No, not Lindsay Lohan, Hayley Mills! From the original Parent Trap from 1961.

Hayley Mills co-stars in Trap as Dr. Grant, the top FBI Profiler. Now, I don’t mean to throw shade at anyone’s age. Institutional knowledge is a key aspect of any long running institution. But, Hayley Mills is 78 years old. It stretches believability just a little that a 78 year old person is running a massive sting operation with hundreds of cops at a pop concert filled with thousands of people. Mills doesn’t have much screen time to prove me wrong, she’s there but her scenes are limited. Instead, her absence seems to prove my point. Shyamalan has created a cat and mouse thriller with only half of that dynamic, perhaps because Mills simply wasn't able to as many scenes as he'd intended for the character.

Did M. Night Shyamalan love The Parent Trap so much that he just had to work with Hayley Mills? Could he not think of a more appropriate role to cast her in than as one of the most pivotal characters in the movie, a role he then had to shoot around to accommodate his chosen star? I can’t definitively say that is what happened, it’s possible that Trap was always intended to just focus on the serial killer character, but without the cat and mouse dynamic, we’re left watching a serial killer try to outwit police and thus our rooting interests are in a strange, deeply unwelcome place.

On top of that, the scenarios that Shyamalan comes up with for this chase thriller are never particularly thrilling. Hartnett lies and schemes to find a way to get out of the concert but instead of basing these scenes on the charm and wits of Hartnett’s Cooper, the film relies on desperate and outlandish contrivances that ruin any chance for the movie to become immersive. We’re constantly laughing at the convenient luck of Hartnett’s killer that we can’t feel any suspense. Cooper is nearly caught several times and each time Shyamalan’s hand as writer and director is clearly what gets the character out of trouble.

The film then enacts three separate endings and that is as exhausting as it sounds. The final act revolves around the pop star Lady Raven in a way that says Shyamalan wanted to make sure to give his daughter a chance to do more than just sing or that Hayley Mills may not have been up for having so much screen time. The choices that Shyamalan makes in the third act are outrageous and silly and all the while, poor Josh Hartnett mistakes eye bugging and twitching for acting in a further embarrassment from his stilted, doofy dad gimmick. He’s not helped by his director who films the final act in close ups so intense you can count Hartnett and co-star Allison Pill’s nose hairs.

That’s another bizarre aspect of Shyamalan’s direction of Trap. Why so many super tight close ups? Camera setups matter. The choice to place the camera at a particular distance from your actors is specific, it’s intentional. These choices should have a purpose, they should be motivated by the visual information the director intends to communicate. Shyamalan’s shot choices come off as erratic and pointless. A close up is a form of visual tension, you are placing your actors in a tight box where their face is the only thing we can see. But characters don’t know that they are being viewed in a close up. Thus, when you direct an actor to act for a hyper-close-up, you tend to get the eye-bugging silliness that we get from Hartnett in Trap.

Trap is, at times, shockingly bad. Scenes drag on for tension free minutes to accommodate Shyamalan’s daughter’s not terrible pop songs. Then, a wild Kid Cudi drops into the movie for a brief, embarrassing moment where he plays an unflattering version of Lil Nas X. Why? I think Shyamalan thinks Lil Nas X is funny but he doesn’t understand why Lil Nas X is funny. Cudi ends up playing the character as androgynous, rude, and creepy. And that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the movie. You could remove this cameo and not affect the movie in the slightest. It’s also not funny. Also, his character is known as The Thinker. Yeah, I don't know what to make of that either.

And, I know I keep digressing, but the movie throws in these comedy beats that are wildly unfunny. As Cooper is scheming a way out of the concert he runs into the mother of a girl who is bullying his daughter at school. This mother character is ported in from a completely different TikTok universe where everyone is a caricature of Karen-culture. This woman’s acting reminded me of those Facebook reels where someone is playing a prank two feet away from the subject of the prank and everyone has to pretend they can’t see the woman is about to surprise the boyfriend who hasn’t seen her in two years, even though all he has to do is look two inches to his right and he will see her wiggling into some elaborate costume.

Is this woman a bad actor? I don’t know. I legitimately think Shyamalan directs his actors to act this way. Take Josh Hartnett for example, he’s a legit actor. He’s been genuinely great in a vast array of roles. I find it hard to believe that he suddenly turned into a bad actor. No, he was directed to act this way. He was told to be broad and weird and bug out his eyes and overplay being a doofus dad. If he were always this way he would never have become a movie star. Therefore, I have to blame Shyamalan. This has to be what he wanted and that makes Trap so much more unfortunate and misguided.

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