Trap is the latest flick from M. Night Too-Shy-Shy-Hush-Hush-Eye-To-Eye. M. Night became the next big thing in 1999 with The Sixth Sense and managed to keep the dream going with Unbreakable, Signs and The Village.
Then the wheels fell off with The Lady In The Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth. The crazy jalopy that was M. Night’s career went right off the cliff, Thelma and Louise-style.
What caused this? Audience fatigue? An overreliance on “the twist?” Or simply disappearing up one’s own buttocks? These are questions for the film historians among us.
Yet, M. Night did not give up. He retooled himself into a medium-tier filmmaker and pumped out smaller-scale films like The Visit, Split, and Glass, which revisited the Unbreakable universe, the wonky Old, and the subversively interesting A Knock At The Cabin.
Phase-Two M. Night is kind of fun. All of the pressure is off. He can simply play around in his own little sandbox with reasonable budgets, and no expectations and see what happens.
What happens with Trap? We will take a mostly spoiler-free gander at the movie.
Story
Trap immediately generates an amount of intrigue with its silly premise. A serial killer takes his daughter to an Indian Taylor Swift concert. Police know the serial killer is in the arena, but they don’t know his identity. They surround the building and aim to flush their quarry out of the crowd.
If the movie had stayed with this premise, it might have achieved a reasonable level of entertainment and suspense. Do you remember the sequence in Firefox when Clint Eastwood’s character needs to escape the subway? That could have been Trap’s entire runtime.
Instead, M. Night makes other…choices. These will be examined in more detail later.
Cast
Trap stars Josh Harnett in the serial killer role. Harnett followed a similar path as M. Night. He was the next big thing as an insufferable douche twenty-something. Then his career cooled down, possibly by choice. Now Harnett is a fairly interesting forty-something actor. It is nice to see him pop up in films.
Harnett is solid as the serial killer. He even borders on great fun at times. He is essentially a monster wearing a dorky-dad mask. Watching him try to finesse his way out of the trap piques interest as he runs into roadblocks and attempts to problem-solve himself past them.
Ariel Donoghue plays Harnett’s daughter. The character serves little purpose beyond giving Harnett a reason to be at the concert. The character’s name might actually be Plot Device.
Oddly enough, Hayley Mills is in this film. M. Night must be a fan of Pollyanna, The Parent Trap, The Moon-Spinners, and That Darn Cat. Hey, who isn’t? It is good to see Mills again, but she is also given little to do, even though she is the criminal profiler who devised the trap.
I heard that woman who sang karaoke in Picard is also in Trap. I would mention her name, but Picard was so bad that it gave me hysterical blindness. Whenever I see people associated with it, I see nothing but a soft blur. The truly crazy thing is that I didn’t even watch Picard, and it still gave me hysterical blindness…
Commercial
Trap also stars R&B singer Saleka. Saleka has a last name. Can you guess it?
It is Shyamalan. Saleka is M. Night’s eldest daughter. That explains why the first hour of the movie is essentially a Saleka commercial. Her singing and dancing are continually front and center while the story goes on in between her musical numbers.
It is shameless parental promotion. It makes one realize that the central idea of the movie was only original by accident. It was all built to advertise the brand name that is “Saleka.” Once one realizes that, the intrigue rapidly drains away, and it all seems like more of a cynical money grab than usual.
Construction
Eventually, the commercial part of the movie passes, and we get to the movie part of the movie. How does M. Night work as a director and writer in this one?
His direction is fine. M. Night was always a decent visual storyteller. As for the story part of the proceedings, one comes to a singular conclusion.
M. Night don’t give an eff about nuffin!
Things are mostly on rails for the first 45 minutes. It is fun to watch Harnett do his thing when he gets screentime. Granted, it is not fully satisfying because some things happen that stretch credibility, but one holds onto their suspension of disbelief with their fingernails and rolls with it.
Then M. Night’s writing becomes the equivalent of a drunk weaving down the sidewalk. Movies generally follow a plot formula. Things are set up and resolved. The story follows a sensible path. M. Night has to know this stuff. Yet, he chooses to ignore it.
I can’t lie. If you are interested in story structure, some enjoyment exists in watching M. Night abandon his plot and go into full-on, screw-it mode. He simply starts following whatever whims comes to mind to bring his tale to a conclusion. Yet, this sort of thing can’t be rewarded despite its trainwreck nature.
It’s a Trap!
Since this is an M. Night film, the art of the twist always comes to mind. This can make it difficult to watch his movies and go with the flow. One is always on the look out for clues regarding a possible reversal.
That happens with Trap, too. As one watches, they start trying to guess how they are being misled. A few theories also got floated around with the release of the trailer.
So, is there a twist? Not really. Some revealing happens, but it doesn’t particularly qualify as a twist. As stated above, the last half of the movie is all over the place. One doesn’t know where it is going to end up. Eventually, it has to land somewhere because runtime demands it.
Trap Sprung
Ultimately, Trap wastes an entertaining performance by Harnett to promote M. Night’s daughter. It then becomes an exercise in drunken writing. It has some value in watching things go awry if you enjoy that sort of thing. Maybe someone, somewhere could make a case that M. Night is a genius not bound by convention, who subverts expectations. I’m not falling into that trap, however…
