M. Night Shyamalan’s proudly idiosyncratic career continues unabated with Trap, a profoundly silly and extremely entertaining little thriller that only becomes more of a blast as it expands its scope and gets progressively goofier. Initially, though, it presents as an elaborate locked room story. Meet Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett), who is doing the good dad thing and escorting his teen daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to the arena to see a sold-out concert from her favorite performer Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan, the director’s daughter, of course — a little more on that later). He seems like a genuinely nice guy, doing his best to be an enthusiastic participant without embarrassing the kid, even doing a little parental diplomacy when he runs into the mom of one of Riley’s friends, with whom she’s been falling out.
Skip ahead a little, so it turns out that there’s a serial killer called The Butcher, the authorities (led by a forensic profiler played by Hayley Mills, from The Parent Trap — lol, see what you did there) have sussed out that he’s going to be at this very same concert, the place is surrounded, and there’s no way out. And also, of course, Cooper is The Butcher. What follows is a series of increasingly absurd narrative shifts, tonal change-ups, and humor, both black and not-so-black, as Cooper tries to escape the titular trap without alerting Riley to his secret identity.
Trap shreds plausibility from the jump. The oddity of a daytime pop concert is shrugged off with a bit of dialogue, but other, more crucial absurdities pile up one after another. The good news is it’s that mountain of absurdities that is entirely the fun part. A wise man once said that if you buy the premise, you have to buy the bit, and so anyone out there dinging Trap for being built upon implausibility is just a basic narc. Who cares about something like a modern arena show having paper tickets when you’ve got Hartnett rolling around like his head’s on fire?
By the way, Hartnett is turning in the performance of his career here, knowing exactly when to over and underplay the psycho living under the smiling dad face. Watching him charm and/or snake his way into and out of his various attempts to extricate himself from this, often with little more than a big broad smile or a tiny twitch of the jaw, is a total blast. By the time he’s in full-blown killer mode as the film approaches its climax, you’ve watched this man eat a full meal of a role. And Shyamalan shoots the hell out of it, only occasionally straying from Cooper’s perspective, keeping viewers locked in right behind his eyes.
About that climax, though; sadly, it’s a bit of a whiff. Not because it’s too silly or somehow unsatisfying, but because the movie has consistently escalated further roughly every 10 minutes, and the finale is — intentionally, but still — a tad too intimate. Sure, there’s a final little twist, but honestly, there are about five different and appealingly sillier directions to go in. Also, Shyamalan’s insistence that this is somehow a reflection on the terrors of parenting doesn’t really hold up, mostly because it takes such a narrative and thematic backseat until nearly the end. Casting his own daughter as a potential foil for his evil avatar certainly provokes the question, “Was making scary movies ruining my child’s youth?” but, you know, that’s quite an uptown problem. In any case, none of these dents are enough to snuff the fun out of the enterprise as a whole. Shyamalan’s early days of making galvanic genre almost-masterpieces may be long behind him, but he’s still more than capable of cranking out sturdy, playful films like Trap to moviegoers’ immense benefit.
DIRECTOR: M. Night Shyamalan; CAST: Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Alison Pill; DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros. Pictures; IN THEATERS: August 2; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 35 min.
