In a manhunt thriller, you can pile up ridiculous coincidences and endless strokes of luck for ironic laughs, or you can play them straight. But after 45 minutes or so, you risk audience frustration either way.
Such is the case with M. Night Shyamalan’s wobbly family affair Trap, a movie about a devoted but psychopathic father taking his teenaged daughter to the concert of a lifetime. In the movie, the Taylor Swift-ian superstar on tour is played by writer-director-producer Shyamalan’s own daughter, Saleka Shyamalan, who wrote and sings much of her own material.
Premise: pretty solid, actually. The father, a stalwart-on-the-surface firefighter played by a perpetually scheming Josh Hartnett, is a serial killer known only as the Butcher, with 12 victims and counting. Teenaged daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) knows only the lovable, protective, dorky side of her dad, since she’s not privy to the twitchy close-ups of Hartnett that we, the audience, are fed, endlessly.
Somewhere between 83% and 91% of the plot is in the trailer. The concert’s a massively coordinated FBI sting operation, set up to ensnare the killer, to the tune of thousands of screaming fans of Lady Raven.
Once the killer gets wind of the scheme, Trap pulls an extended variation on Norman Bates’ shower murder cleanup routine in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Audiences couldn’t help hope but root for Norman to hide the body, and the car, in the swamp.
Here, Shyamalan has similar intentions: His movie would be nothing without Hartnett’s serial killer outfoxing his pursuers, slipping past one security barrier after another, stealing access badges willy-nilly and engineering his daughter’s onstage appearance with her idol. The backstage access that comes with that improbable narrative short-cut paves the way for the main character’s mission, which is to kill again.
Good, bad or middling, very little of Shyamalan’s works can be described as tightly plotted, well-sprung suspense. Beginning with The Sixth Sense and Signs, he has favoured the unfashionable fabulist’s virtue of atmosphere and patience. (In a nastier vein, so does Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs, a big hit this summer.)
Trap works against that virtue; its plot is more of an overt pressure cooker, or should be. It’s also somewhat alien to Shyamalan’s storytelling instincts. Ideally, a pressure cooker should feel like one, and here the editing rhythms favour an oddly languid pace and too much of his dialogue strains for jokes or reiterates story points previously established.
Hitchcock remains a primary reference point for this filmmaker. And though Hartnett has far fewer personalities to activate than James McAvoy relished in Shyamalan’s Split, he does all he can to make the implausibles plausible.
He is, however, an actor. Not a miracle worker. — Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service
Summary:
All filler no killer
