At this point, some 30 years into M. Night Shyamalan’s career, it’s easy to feel some grudging affection for his movies, even if you’ve historically hated or felt indifferently toward them. They tend to be short. Occasionally the twists are clever. He favors slow-burning suspense over grisliness. He’s a director who cares about what he gives an audience, even if that means he sometimes trips himself up in his eagerness to please.
Trap isn’t the worst Shyamalan movie; no one would say it’s the best. It’s suspended somewhere in the murky middle, but at the very least it has an amiable goofiness. Josh Hartnett plays Cooper, a devoted Philadelphia dad who’s making good on a promise to his daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue): as a reward for getting stellar grades, he’s taking her to see her favorite pop star, the enormously popular Lady Raven (played by the pop singer Saleka Shyamalan, the director’s daughter). On the drive to the stadium and as they make their way in, Cooper does every dad thing right, including shelling out the bucks for a concert tee and asking predictably clueless questions about current kid slang. (Riley matter-of-factly tells him what crispy means.) He also learns, from a friendly T-shirt seller (played, with vigorous bonhomie, by Jonathan Langdon), that the authorities have learned that a seemingly uncatchable serial killer—known, for reasons that don’t take much imagination, as The Butcher—has a ticket for the night’s festivities. The place is surrounded by cops who have vowed to catch the sicko.
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That’s all you need to know, and should know, about the plot of Trap. Shyamalan’s direction is workmanlike here: you can see him pulling all the levers, inserting a telling shot here, an “Oh no, really?” character reaction there. You can pretty much guess where it’s headed, though you might still find a few surprises in how it gets there. There are numerous implausibilities, and a lot of “inside the mind of a criminal” folderol—but then, this is an M. Night Shyamalan movie. Kid Cudi gets a cameo as a swanning, Bedazzled superstar known as The Thinker. Saleka Shyamalan, in false eyelashes almost as long as her tall silver boots, is convincing as a pop star capable of captivating a huge audience, and perhaps less so as an inadvertent serial-killer catcher; still, she does her damnedest. And Hartnett, an often charming actor, makes a great doting, ridiculous dad—though he’s also able to navigate the shift into darker territory.
And then there’s onetime child star Hayley Mills’ performance, in a too-tiny role, as a no-nonsense criminal profiler. If you had told me, when I was a tot circa 1965, that someday we’d all walk around with miniature computers-slash-communication devices in our pockets, I would have said, OK, plausible. A billionaire and TV personality being elected President despite having zero qualifications for the job? Sure, it could happen. But the Hayley Mills of The Parent Trap, The Trouble with Angels, and That Darn Cat! taking grim, professional delight in zapping an elusive criminal with a bunch of tiny electrically charged harpoons? That I would not have bought. It may be the greatest of Trap’s meager pleasures. But it’s something.
