Why is M. Night Shyamalan "trapped?"

Josh Hartnett and Ariel Donoghue attend the Lady Raven concert in Trap.

        I don’t consider myself an apologist for much in this world, it’s just not my style. But with some reflection, I suppose I must confess that I am sort of an apologist for writer/director M. Night Shyamalan. He’s one of those artists whom I think fans are not always fair to, as if the general viewing public has expected another The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan’s first film and without question his biggest success and in my opinion, not even his best movie.

The problem with M. Night Shyamalan is that he has been largely inconsistent over the last twenty-five years or so. His movies range from (in my opinion) excellent, like The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable (my personal favorite), Signs, and The Village, to not too bad/kinda good like The Happening, The Visit, Old, Knock at the Cabin, and Split, to dismal, such as The Lady in the Water and Glass. Perhaps it’s that inconsistency that still keeps me curious every time he releases a movie. Every time an M. Night Shyamalan movie comes out, for whatever reason, I really want to like it. I’m always hoping that he’ll rediscover his stride in this latter part of his career, perhaps do something completely different and innovative. I think he is capable of that. When I was warned against watching Trap, his most recent film, I was hoping to prove the naysayers wrong, that Trap would fit into that first category of M. Night movies I’d mentioned. Well, the naysayers win again. Trap falls into that third category of M. Night movies, maybe scoring a place of honor at the top.

Like most of M. Night’s movies, the idea behind Trap isn’t bad: led by a brilliant criminal profiler, police and FBI swarm over a concert to set a “trap” for the notorious serial killer known as the Butcher, whom they believe to be in attendance at the concert. Every exit is covered, every person will be checked upon exit. There should be no escape.

The movie stars Josh Hartnett as Cooper, who has taken his young teenage daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to pop sensation Lady Raven’s concert in what is supposed to be a shining moment of him being Super Dad, being locked in an arena with 20,000 screaming fans. Almost immediately, he notices the large police presence, and (SPOILER ALERT) it doesn’t take long for us to realize he is actually the Butcher, the serial killer the authorities are trying to trap. For the next hour and a half, we watch Cooper engage in a game of chess with the authorities as he tries to find a way out of the arena before they catch him. That game of chess eventually dissolves into a messy tennis match of near catches, escapes, and tagging in of other supporting characters to serve as foils for Harnett’s Butcher, which makes a movie that is not really that long, by today’s standards, feel excruciatingly long and unnecessary.

There’s a lot of problems in this picture to unpack, so I’ll focus on the most obvious: Harnett himself. He’s our handsome star and seems as if he would have been better used as what he initially appears as, as a kind, cool dad taking his daughter to a concert. In the early moments of the film, I assumed that’s all he would be, a concerned father trying to keep his daughter away from a deranged killer. I think had M. Night chosen this angle in the story, the movie might have worked better. Instead, Hartnett calls in a performance that I can only call goofy. While he interacts with his daughter and other adults, Hartnett’s Cooper is syrupy sweet – like some 1950s Disney Dad -  so much so that at some point I actually said out loud, “Is this supposed to be a satire?” Once that idea crossed my mind, I rekindled my hopes in the movie being better. Unfortunately, Trap is not satire, and I am sure Hartnett and/or Shyamalan or both would come up with some ham-handed explanation about how his toothy smiles and “Aw shucks” attitude were purposeful things, the result of a psychopath trying to hide his true nature, but I wasn’t buying it. It was poor acting from a guy who’s not a bad actor (and he’s not the only one in this film).

Hartnett’s Butcher is also given the respect of some kind of super criminal who out maneuvers and outfoxes hundreds of police officers and FBI agents with the ease of the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, but in this film, they aren’t strokes of criminal genius, for the most part they are just a bunch of coincidences and happy accidents. There isn’t one trademark M. Night Big Twist in this film, there are a couple, and they all only serve to keep the agonizing action going and portray Cooper the Butcher as some sort of mastermind. It’s exhausting.

M. Night Shyamalan has always, in a bit of Hitchcockian self-aggrandizement, has not only always appeared in his films but has even given himself a place of importance (remember how, in The Lady in the Water, his character’s writing was going to save humanity or something? Shudder …), and that is fine. In Trap, he casts his daughter Saleka Shyamalan as Lady Raven. Not only does she play the pop star, she sings all the songs. Again, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. She acts well enough, she sings well enough, and the spectacle of the concert, given the budget, comes across as believable. Still, it is a bit nepotistic and if the movie worked, I wouldn’t even mention it. It’s just another odd choice in a movie full of them. Funny enough, the original concept was to integrate Saleka’s music into the plot of the film, taking inspiration from Purple Rain. Again, not a bad idea by itself. If you took the Butcher out of it, it might have worked.

Ariel Donoghue is believable as Hartnett’s daughter Riley and perhaps one of the few standout performances. Hayley Mills’s Dr. Josephine, the FBI profiler, is wooden and uninteresting and her disembodied narration through the police radio Cooper steals annoying. Shyamalan uses of camera work is questionable as well. His original idea of the film, that of Silence of the Lambs at a pop concert was likely his inspiration for the awkward, overdone extreme closeups of the actors talking in several scenes. In Silence of the Lambs, however, Jonathon Demme’s use of close-ups on his actors drew you into the film and made you uncomfortable while in Trap, while they also make you feel uncomfortable, it has more to do with the bad dialogue and goofy performances, whereas Silence of the Lambs is a masterpiece with an incredible cast, Trap is a masterclass in what should not be done.

You know, I am a capitalist, and if people are willing to pay M. Night to make these movies – and Trap made a profit, mind you – then so be it. I’m happy for him. I do believe he is a talented writer and director and am always curious about what he is up to, hoping for a return to form of the early 2000s. It just hasn’t happened yet. And if Trap is what his putting out these days, it may never will.