Review: Trap

Director:  M Night Shyamalan

Stars:  Josh Hartnett, Jonathan Langdon, Ariel Donaghue

Billing Trap as ‘an M. Night Shyamalan experience’ – as the hard-sell campaign has been keen to do – is something worth contemplating. What that implies. What’s being offered. Say Shyamalan’s name to most people with even a passing knowledge of his work and among the first words you’re likely to get back is “twist”. That’s pretty fair, considering a sting in the tail typified his four biggest successes (a hot-streak that ran from 1999’s The Sixth Sense to 2004’s The Village). But his recent run of modest successes have tried to shrug off this expectation, preferring instead to snake inventively throughout their entire running time. The results may have been uneven, but this later period of Shyamalan films are rarely – if ever – dull.

The ‘experience’, then, is an unpredictable weave that takes place in a heightened version of the world we know. Recent Shyamalan films have leaned into conventions and styles made popular in B-movies of years gone by, or classic TV shows like The Twilight Zone. ‘What if’ ponderings presented in a manner that frames them as modern fantasies. Shyamalan’s separating of his world from our own is typified by arch, almost hysterical dialogue patter and a slightly maverick (if derivative) visual flare.

Trap continues this trend with gusto, powered in large part by a resurgent Josh Hartnett. The ‘experience’ offered this time is a high-wire, high-concept thriller (as with Old and Knock at the Cabin) that’s pitched at a remove from the humdrum logistics of our own dreary reality.

Philadelphia firefighter Cooper (Hartnett) is a great dad, taking his excited daughter Riley (Ariel Donaghue) to a matinee pop concert on the arena scale. Cooper starts feeling twitchy at the rather intense police presence surrounding the venue. Collaring a helpful vendor named Jamie (Jonathan Langdon), he gets the scoop; the FBI are using the gig as an elaborate trap to catch renowned serial killer The Butcher. This is interesting news to family man Cooper, who happens to be the man they’re after. With every exit covered, his daughter present and the dragnet closing in, it’s time for Cooper to see how resourceful he really is.

Shyamalan’s deference to Hitchcock and by extension De Palma has long been clear, and Trap is among his most overt love letters to both. Particularly the latter, given that his stadium-sized conceit instantly recalls De Palma’s wildly ambitious Snake Eyes. Given the prevalence of mega-tours like Renaissance and Eras in recent years, Trap is cannily timed to capitalise on increasingly popular shared experiences. But there’s also something of Raising Cain knitted into it’s DNA, as Cooper tries to wrestle with two compartmentalised sides of his personality colliding over the course of an increasingly unhinged day.

In an effort to keep his latest offering accelerating, Shyamalan leans into contrivance and coincidence, taking the viewer by the hand and asking them to leave a lot of basic logic and common sense at the door in favour of the thrill ride. If you’re someone who finds themselves saying “that would never happen” over varying minutiae throughout a film, Trap is liable to drive you absolutely silly. Shyamalan’s key decision this time out is perhaps to start us at that point. The idea of this scale of manpower involved in a sweep and search is inherently absurd. Once you’ve swallowed that pill, the ones to follow aren’t nearly so bitter. You just have to keep chugging them down.

The after effects may be temporary, but the high is certainly worth the effort. As is often the case of late with this filmmaker the results vary due to a number of factors. Hartnett is the absolute powerhouse that keeps this thing on track (offering up something charismatic yet manic, akin to something Dan Stevens might provide), but not everyone shares his eager screen confidence.

M. Night’s daughter Saleka plays pop starlet Lady Raven. She sells it on stage (as well she should, debut album out now), but that wherewithal mostly evaporates once she’s dragged into the dramatic meat of the movie. Still, this stiff tentativeness mostly works given the situations the character finds herself in. It may be the most grounded element of all, even if some of her decisions are, to put it mildly, mental.

Which brings us, inevitably to the third act, where I sense a lion’s share of the movie’s criticisms will focus. All I’ll say is that if you’re put off by the silliness invoked here, where the hell were you for the first two thirds? Trap is nonsense, but it’s nonsense all the way through, and Shyamalan makes it your decision whether to enter into this or not. If you choose not to, this is liable to feel like a long 105 minutes. If you choose fun, there’s an awful lot less to quibble about, and a great deal of high energy filmmaking to be enjoyed along the way. Waiting for some eleventh hour ‘aha’ moment is a fool’s errand and quite pointedly not the kind of thing Shyamalan trades in at this point in his career. Ultimately, if you feel let down, consider what it was you decided that you wanted in the first place.

On a technical level this is up there with his most confident features, and his showmanship hasn’t felt this fun in quite a few years. Like an arena-sized pop concert, it’s best to let yourself get swept up in the bananas spectacle of it all. Go for the experience.