Overview
A father and teen daughter attend a pop concert, where they realize they're at the center of a dark and sinister event.
Only M Night Shyamalan could get away with making a thriller as a means to get his daughter a starring role and write a soundtrack album of pop-songs!
Trap, the latest from the writer/director is pretty much typical M Night from start to finish. The set up sees a firefighter in Philadelphia, Cooper (Josh Hartnett) taking his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert performed by Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan). There he spies a rather large police presence, and soon discovers that the concert is being used as a sting operation to capture a serial killer known as the Butcher. The thing is, Cooper is the Butcher, and then starts to formulate a way to escape the trap that has been set, whilst still trying to make the night a special one for his daughter.
Where this film works is in the central performance from Hartnett, who balances the caring father well with the cold and calculating killer side to him throughout the first two acts. As he assesses the arena, and plans his escape, his always calm manner is tested to the limits as all potential avenues are cut off one by one, and with the clock ticking as the concert draws on, time is against him in escaping. Hartnett balances this all perfectly, going from confident and determined at the start to an underlying look of desperation, via the gradual introduction of certain facial tics over the run-time of the film. He makes for a captivating presence, and bizarrely, despite him being the bad guy here you strangely start to root for him to escape.
However, some elements of coincidence do start to introduce themselves in order to force the idea along, with everything and everyone just being in the right place at the right time for Cooper to gain an advantage, and it does make the suspension of disbelief a tad difficult as the events play out. In addition, much like other M Night works, the last act starts to crumble somewhat, becoming more and more preposterous, and never knowing exactly when the story should end. There are some nice ideas in the final act (which I won’t mention due to spoilers), but sadly they don’t serve to lift it up much. Overexplaining and overplayed have become the norm with M Night films, and here is no different.
That said, I did have a decent enough time with Trap, and once again find myself more enamoured with M Night’s filmmaking style and use of his cast than the actual story itself. Never really going to be a film I’ll go back to, but it just about passed the time well enough thanks, primarily, to that central performance showcasing what Hartnett can deliver.