No director’s output has more wild swings in quality than M. Night Shyamalan’s does. Will Trap represent a peak or a valley?
There is a line in Trap, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest horror-adjacent thriller, that gets at the core of my feelings on the film. The line comes late in the movie, during a discussion between Josh Hartnett’s serial killer character and his wife. It is an important conversation, one that occurs at the point in the script that tensions should be the most heightened, and one that contains a serving of Shyamalan’s signature “big reveals”. Here is the quote:
I’m not great at a lot of things, Rachel, but keeping my two lives separate is not one of them.
I am not a professional writer. I do this as a hobby, without an editor. I may or may not be a particularly good writer, that certainly isn’t for me to say, but I do take pride in what I do. I try my hardest to review my posts multiple times before they go up, but as soon as I post anything, I will invariably notice some turn of phrase that didn’t quite land or a word that I re-used too close to the first time I used it. My point is that I care about this blog, but the stakes are incredibly low if I don’t do a good job. The sentence I quoted above, from Trap, an internationally released motion picture with a $30MM budget, would never make the cut in something I posted here on Flip Flop Slap Fight. I was honestly a little bit stunned when I heard it in the movie. It is just a disaster of phrasing… Obviously, that double negative is the big offender, but overall it simply sounds phony and nonsensical. The fact that this sentence made it through the script-writing and revision process, all the way through production, and onto the screen is unfathomable to me. Yet, it is but a small, pointed example of the lack of quality behind the Trap script.
In case you don’t know the premise, the film centers on a father (Cooper) and daughter (Riley) attending a concert of Taylor Swift stand-in, Lady Raven. The thing about this particular show, however, is that it is being heavily patrolled by police and FBI who are working in conjunction with event staff and Lady Raven herself to corner and capture a notorious serial killer. That serial killer also happens to be Cooper. Maybe that technically qualifies as a spoiler, except for two mitigating factors: 1. You really shouldn’t bother watching this movie, and 2. This becomes clear within the first fifteen minutes of the film, and within the first two minutes of the trailer. What comes next is theoretically a cat and mouse game with Cooper trying to find a way to avoid detection while keeping Riley in the dark about his true identity. The concept is, on its face, ridiculous. There is no world in which the authorities would take on the liability of trapping a dangerous murderer in a building full of pre-teen and teenage girls in order to find him. Yet, while I wish that the movie had done a little more to explain away how that decision was made, I don’t get too upset over it because that plot is the hook that got you to watch in the first place. As an audience member, I signed up for this silliness, so I can only be so annoyed by it. It’s a lot like The Purge in that way. What pisses me off is that every supporting plot point is either handled in the laziest way possible or not explored at all. For example, Cooper is meant to be a calculating master manipulator who plays various event staff or police officers to his advantage, but it consistently comes off as the script-writers bending the film’s universe to make it as easy as possible for its antagonist. Need some inside information on how the operation is being run? A chatty t-shirt salesman with no reason to trust you volunteers that information with virtually no prompting. Need to get backstage to avoid the police checks? Randomly approach the one concert staff member who happens to make the decision about which young girl gets to join Lady Raven on stage and very easily convince him that it should be your daughter. Even more frustrating is that I never understood how the titular trap was meant to be sprung.
The idea is that every adult man in attendance will be stopped and questioned on the way out of the arena. Setting aside the logistical challenge of that, it is completely unclear what questions they intend to ask that will ensnare the villain. Yet, everyone seems super confident that this is a fool-proof plan. This man is supposed to be a hyper-intelligent manipulator, remember, so your telling me that one of the random cops manning the exit he happens to use is going to outwit him into admitting he is a serial killer? I never understood how that was supposed to work, so I never bought into the stakes for Cooper, so none of his decisions made any sense to me, especially when he volunteers the information that he is the serial killer to a prominent character in order to avoid going through a police check-point. His gambit works, but it leaves a massive loose end where this person could immediately go to the cops when they are out of his sight and give them his name, physical description, and his address! Except this doesn’t happen because that person makes the nonsensical decision to stay with him and try to complete the investigation themselves. The most frustrating part is that it wouldn’t have taken that much effort to make a reasonably more plausible scenario. Maybe the police have a partial fingerprint from the scene of a crime, and they are going to secretly procure the fingerprints of every man leaving the arena. I don’t know, there are plenty of holes to poke in that one, but I didn’t have months of pre-production to solve this problem like the film-makers did.
The real bummer of all of this shoddy workmanship is that it completely wastes some strong performances. Josh Hartnett as Cooper is doing his damndest to keep his character compelling through all of the dopey plot mechanics and half-baked dialogue, and his effort is the best thing about the movie by far. In a world where Shyamalan took a couple extra runs at the script and really leaned into the general campiness of the concept, Hartnett could have made this a sleeper success, a la James McAvoy in Split. Similarly, Ariel Donoghue does a very commendable job portraying Riley. A lot of the discourse around the movie has been regarding Saleka’s portrayal of Lady Raven. If you are unaware, Saleka is Shyamalan’s daughter, and the gripe among critics and moviegoers seems to be that a good quarter of this movie just seems to be a commercial for the concept of Saleka as a pop star. That is a valid gripe, actually, but it didn’t really bug me too much. First, Saleka does cut a reasonably convincing figure as the type of performer that would resonate with young girls, and I think you have to expect the concert element to be prominently placed in a movie with this concept. More importantly, I couldn’t get over the lousy writing long enough to get annoyed at anything else, even Saleka’s much more questionable turn as third-act protagonist and super sleuth. I mean, it’s been a few minutes, go read that line again.
I go into every Shyamalan movie hoping it will be on par with Split or Signs or even A Knock at the Cabin. Flawed movies, one and all, but ultimately the good outweighs the bad. Too often, though, I end up with Trap or Old, and those are films so dire that the potential for a solid payoff is becoming less and less enticing to keep returning to his work. He’s nothing if not clever, though, and he never fails to deliver interesting hooks for his movies which entice us to tune in. That is the real trap that keeps us coming back when he has let us down so many times.
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