M Night Shyamalan’s new movie is frequently silly, occasionally thrilling, and makes a modicum of sense. It’s also ridiculously good fun. Here’s our Trap review.
Josh Hartnett’s Cooper is very good at being a dad. He’s taking his daughter, Riley, to a pop concert, for a start, which is nice of him. He tries to get his offspring to teach him internet slang. He shakes his head disapprovingly when the kids around them whip out their smartphones. He clearly loves Riley very much. It’s all very sweet.
Josh Hartnett is also a very tall man. His sheer size turns him into an odd duck like a reverse Jodie Foster in Silence Of The Lambs. When he goes to the bathroom, his head sticks out over the stall. His sense of not-belonging only gets more intense when he uses his phone to check on the young man tied up in his basement.
All of which would make him rather easy to spot in a Taylor Swift-level concert, one would imagine. At least, that’s what the police think – the whole event, an incredibly trusting employee tells him, is a set-up to catch the prolific serial killer known as ‘The Butcher’. I wonder who that could be…
Trap is an M Night Shyamalan movie through and through, which means taking a high-fives-all-round premise (based, improbably, on a true story) and making the hell out of it. It is not subtle. The dialogue is 80% serviceable; the other 20% clangs like a blow to the head. The plot has enough holes to drive a limo through it. I’m really not sure if it’s good – but it’s probably the most fun I’ve had in the cinema in months.
Either way, it’s a deceptively difficult film to pin down. Genuinely brilliant visual filmmaking is blasted aside when characters announce what just happened moments earlier. A precisely calibrated first 70 minutes is weighed down by an ending that drags on far more than it should. The plot flip-flops between ingenious and gloriously stupid multiple times a minute.
Hartnett, of course, is having the time of his life, but crucially manages not to overdo the Mrs Doubtfire-style separate lives thing. Ariel Donoghue is consistently believable as Riley, and their relationship together is lovely to watch despite – or perhaps because – we know Cooper chops people to bits in his spare time. Saleka Shyamalan makes for a perfectly believable popstar (perhaps because she is one), and her dad even turns up for a bit in a cameo which borders on an actual role.
Read more: The Night Chronicles | M Night Shyamalan’s lost urban horror trilogy
Any negatives, of course, are outweighed by a film which is clearly having an absolute ball. It’s a pitch-perfect recreation, warts and all, of a classic high-concept movie. The only real downside is that its presence highlights how few of them we’re given anymore.
It is, in other words, a Shyamalan movie. I’d wager your enjoyment of Trap rests almost completely on whether Hartnett’s first line inspires an eye roll or a fist pump. On their way to the concert, Riley encourages Cooper to run a red light. He stops the car, turns to her, and says:
“We’re not gonna break any laws, here…”
Trap is in UK cinemas now.
