Trap (2024)

Starring: Josh Hartnett, Saleka, Kid Cudi, Russ, and M. Night Shyamalan
Grade: D-

“Stop telling stories. Monsters aren’t real!”

Girl, you have a lot to learn.

Summary

Cooper (Hartnett) is driving his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to the Lady Raven (Saleka) concert. On the drive there, Riley is singing along with the words of a recent song of hers. She stops to tell Cooper to speed through the light, but he calmly states how he’s not going to break any laws and they’ll get there when they get there. She comments that maybe she could be a singer someday, and Cooper encourages it with a half-hearted response of “Maybe”. Finally, they get to the concert and park. Cooper jokingly tries to tie his shoe because he knows Riley is in a rush, but she hurries him along. They get to the arena, but the line is long. Cooper apologizes, but this was the earliest time he could get off work. He holds her up in the air and they see a security guard exit the bus. Everyone there is disappointed when they see it isn’t Lady Raven. Right after, Lady Raven exits her own bus and the fans all cheer her on, including Cooper and Riley who get to see her enter the arena. The two walk together afterwards, and Riley talks about how happy she is that Lady Raven added this afternoon concert after she sold out. A random guy offers 10th row tickets, but Cooper tells her to ignore it and to not let people fool her. He still thinks their tickets are good enough. Even though it’s row 44, they’re on the floor, which is pretty good. He asks how the girls at school have been once they get in line, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. As they stand there, Cooper notices the armed security all around the building. They get into the building, and Riley sees some young girls doing a choreographed dance together that is from one of Lady Raven’s music videos. She joins them, and Cooper records it. They grab some food at the concession stand, and Riley admits the girls aren’t mean anymore, though they don’t include her and keep posting stuff together. He notes how it must be hard seeing what everyone’s doing all the time and how everyone is so connected even when they aren’t that close. He gives a lame suggestion of the two of them taking a picture together instead when they go inside adding, “Jody will be so jelly”.

Riley laughs but tells him that it’s a terrible idea and to not say “jelly”. The two find their seats, and Riley is elated, saying it’s the best day of her life. Cooper gives Riley credit for getting four “A’s” and a “B”, telling her she has earned this. As the opener plays, Cooper notices a lot of cops at all the entrances.

Later, Riley tells Cooper how the new slang term to describe something good is “crispy”. He jokingly suggests saying “Extra fried” because it’s better than crispy, but she tells him not to say this and she’s not teaching him any other words. Soon after, the lights go out. It’s time for Lady Raven to hit the stage. The crowd goes nuts, and Cooper smiles watching Riley lose her mind over her. In the middle of it, Cooper goes to use the bathroom. He gives Riley the option of staying in her seat or waiting outside the men’s room for him. She says she will stay in her seat because she doesn’t want to leave. So, Cooper goes to the bathroom and into a stall. There, he checks his phone and checks the camera from the inside of a home on his phone. There, he has a man locked up in the basement. When he goes to wash his hands, he imagines an old woman there washing her hands too. As armored trucks head to the arena, Cooper exits the bathroom. He runs into Jody’s mother (Marnie McPhail) who correctly assumes he’s there with Riley. She brings up how they haven’t seen each other since the parent-teacher conference and she tells him that she really hopes their daughters can still be friends. She says she talked to Jody about including Riley in more things, prompting Cooper to say how hurt Riley was over the whole thing and how it’s hard to see that as a dad. Just as he’s about to go back to his seat, Jody’s mom tells Cooper to tell Riley that Jody, Sarah, and Sarah C. are sitting in section 107 and they’d love to see her. The FBI arrive just as Cooper gets back to his seat to tell Riley that Jody and her mom are there. Either way, he says forget about it. Lady Raven goes on a speech in-between songs about when she was 7, her father left. She held onto that anger for a long time, and it became who she was. One day, she decided to forgive him, or she could never move on. She pretended he was in front of her and said, “You are not responsible for hurting me. I release you”. She says everything got better after that. She encourages the crowd to pick someone who hurt them, try to forgive them, and to say to themselves, “I release you”. If they feel they have, she wants them to turn on the light on their phones. Riley is one of the many that turns the light on her phone. Lady Raven uses this as a transition to a somber song on the piano.

As she sings, Cooper notices a group of cops escort some random guy out on the upper level.

He looks back on his level and sees more cops lined up on the floor. Cooper and Riley go to the t-shirt stand, and Riley stresses how they have to hurry before they finish setting up the stage for the next song. They only have one small left when Riley asks for it, but another girl her age argues for it as well. Cooper tells Riley to let the other girl have it and they’ll find another one for her later. The worker Jamie (Jonathan Langdon) appreciates the good values of their family, tells Cooper that he’ll be getting more shirts in ten minutes, and he’ll hold one aside for them. Cooper goes to the side of the table and takes Jamie aside to ask why all the police and cameras are everywhere. Jamie admits he’s not supposed to say anything, so Cooper swears he won’t snitch. With this, Jamie says the FBI got word that the serial killer known as “The Butcher” who’s been chopping people up was going to be at the concert today. So, they set up a trap for him. This whole concert is a trap. They’re watching all the exits, checking everyone that leaves, and there’s no way out except for backstage, but no one’s getting there. Jamie goes back to work but reiterates to come see him for the t-shirt later, and Cooper appreciates it with a smile. The smile leaves his face though once he realizes the cops are on to him since he is in fact “The Butcher” they are after. He walks with Riley and talks about how he’s craving a funnel cake from one of the stands. He acts like he can’t remember where it was while he eyes an arena worker using his key card. The worker enters a room where cops are stationed, and they question him. Cooper watches this and then tells Riley that the funnel cake stand is further back from where they were, so he leads her there. They get to a point and Cooper acts confused telling her that he thought this was where it was at. Riley hears Lady Raven about to play her next song and tries to get Cooper to go. He stops for a second noticing a drunk woman standing by the staircase. He walks over, discreetly bumps her down the stairs, and she gets the attention of everyone. Cooper takes Riley down the other staircase while people attend to her, and he suggests they pop outside for a second before going back in. She asks why and he ignores her, especially after seeing the SWAT team waiting outside the door.

He changes his tune and acts like he just heard the song play, so he suggests to the confused Riley that they go back to their seats. The song concludes shortly after, and Lady Raven introduces the next song as one she wrote with singer Parker Wayne (Russ). She leads them into chanting Parker’s name, and a trap door opens from the floor in the middle of the aisle, near Cooper and Riley’s seats. Parker comes up from the trap door on a lift and starts singing the next song. Cooper looks under the lift and the trap door. He points it out to Riley and suggests they climb down there to see where it leads because it looks really cool. Riley sees this comment for what it is: really weird. She asks him if something is wrong, and he denies it. He just says he’s excited for her. Telling her to forget it, he calls the concert “crispy”. Once the trap door closes, he tells Riley that he’s going to go to the t-shirt stand again to see if they have the shirt she wanted. He finds Jamie, and Jamie tells him that he has to go to the storage closet to get more merch. Cooper offers to walk with him, so he accepts. They get to the room, and Cooper notices Jamie use his key card to get into the storage area, putting it in his back pocket. He asks Cooper what he does, and he says he works in the fire department. When Jamie goes to grab the box, it’s on the top shelf and he struggles. Cooper offers to help him. When he does, he swiftly grabs Jamie’s key card from his back pocket and grabs the box. Once he puts it on the table, he asks Jamie if they found the Butcher, but he says they haven’t. Jamie then goes on about how he’s obsessed with the guy and how he’s been following him for all 12 victims. He asks Cooper if he’s squeamish, and Cooper says not too much. So, Jamie brings up the victim that was the woman on the bridge. One of his friends was jogging on the bridge before they covered it up, and he got a picture of it. He shows Cooper the picture, and Cooper acts as if he’s nauseous seeing it. Jamie goes on about how cool it would be if they caught him, that all the employees in the arena had to go through some training thing, and how they were all given a code for each section of the arena in case they were stopped by police.

Cooper asks him what the code is if he doesn’t mind saying it. Seeing him as someone on their side on account of his work in the fire department, Jamie has no problem in telling him that it’s “Hamilton”.

He cuts open the box with his box cutter and has Cooper hold it before letting him grab a t-shirt from the top. He even lets Cooper have it for free. Cooper gives him the box cutter back and walks back into the general area. He tries to use the key card on one room, and it doesn’t work. He uses it on the one next to it and this one does. Cooper walks into a locker room and sees a group of cops going over the plan to capture the Butcher. The lead cop shows the group a photo of one of his victims, a married guy who studied to become a teacher. He had a two-year-old son, he took care of his parents, was awarded “Most Liked Teacher” at the school where he works, and how these are the people who should win. Their job is to get the Butcher alone and away from civilians as quickly as possible. He will personally take whoever takes down the Butcher to dinner. Cooper hears it all. More cops enter the room, so Cooper puts the ID card on his jacket and walks through the group to act like he works there and is just grabbing a cup of coffee. While he grabs one, he sees a photo of one of his dismembered victims in a guy’s helmet. One cop interrupts Cooper to ask where he keeps the sugar. Cooper says “Barrett” was supposed to refill it, so he goes into the cabinet below. He finds one, acts like it’s his stash, and lets the cop use it. He leaves donuts out for them that he also found in the cabinet. On the way out, he bumps into a few more cops while apologizing, steals a police walkie-talkie from someone’s unattended bag, throws the coffee out, and exits. Jody’s mom finds Cooper again and talks about how she could tell Cooper was mad earlier. He admits he was but wants to talk about it later. Jody’s mom suggests the girls work things out for themselves, but Cooper again says he’s down to talk about it later. He tries to leave, but she gets serious and stops him, almost making a scene. The cops nearby start to take notice of them as Cooper says this is their day, Riley has been waiting for this for 6 months, and for them to just have fun. Jody’s mom sees this as Cooper patronizing her, but they are interrupted by the FBI apprehending some guy and the cops going over to check on it.

FBI profiler Dr. Josephine Grant (Hayley Mills) watches over the whole thing and Cooper spots her. He uses this opportunity to suggest the girls get a slice of pizza at Carmine’s 1PM on Saturday. They don’t have to be friends. They just need to coexist and not see each other as threats. Jody’s mom is happy with this idea and will bring it up to Jody. Cooper goes back to Riley and puts in an earpiece to listen to the walkie talkie for updates. Grant details that the man they caught isn’t him. She goes over details and says their suspect isn’t going to panic and he’s going to try and figure a way out. With this, she lets the channel go back to the unit commander. The commander says they have a potential match in section 417, seat 12. The commander reminds them of visual markers recorded from surveillance taken from where the bodies were found. The noted bodies of various builds are that of a red-headed male, two African American males of above average height, a male with white hair in his 60s, a white male in his 30s with a tattoo of an animal on his right arm, and a white male with a scar on his lower jaw. Hearing this, Cooper looks at the tattoo of the sheep he has on his right arm. He takes a snap bracelet from the chair ahead of him with Lady Raven’s name on it and uses it to cover his wrist. The commander notes a man with a yellow sweatshirt and to engage with caution. Cooper looks at his phone for the map of the building and then lies and tells Riley he left his credit card at the t-shirt stand and how he’s going to go get it. She is annoyed by this because he keeps leaving. He agrees with her and promises that he won’t leave her after this. She asks if he wants her to come, but he tells her to enjoy it and to tell him everything he misses. Before Cooper leaves, he tells her that in the case they get separated to meet him at the orange drink stand right outside the tunnel. Following this, Cooper walks down a hallway and continues listening to the walkie talkie through an earpiece. Apparently, FBI are set up on the perimeter, barricades are set up on Market Street and Ninth Street, and ground personnel are stationed at every exit. They want continued check-ins at five-minute intervals. Grant gets back on the channel and tells everyone to be ready for Contingency 4.

Grant says that the suspect has realized he can’t get out and will attempt to cause a panic, using the chaos of 20,000 people to get by them. She assumes he will call the police or set off the fire alarm. As she states this, Cooper was ironically about to set off the fire alarm but stops himself. Grant continues and states that in the event this happens, only women and children will be let through. Changing things up, Cooper sneaks into the kitchen of the concession stand, puts a couple of bottles of oil into the friers, turns the friers up, and it causes a mini-explosion minutes after. This allows Cooper to steal an apron and head into a backroom when attention is diverted. He goes to the roof of the building and runs into a couple of cops. Naturally, they ask what he’s doing up there, so he acts like he works in the kitchen and had to get some air because he was freaking out over the kitchen incident because the woman got burned badly. The cops hear about the accident on their earpieces to confirm it. The female cop asks what the code is, and he replies “Hamilton”. The other cop wants to see the card he was given at the presentation. Cooper looks in the apron and by sheer luck, he finds a wallet and the card he needed to maintain the lie. To pile on, he tells the cops to not tell his boss he took a break. Before he leaves, he asks the cops who the older woman was that did the presentation because it looked like she was running the show. The cop tells him that she’s a profiler, she’s captured 10 of these guys before, and she’s thought of everything. Cooper comments, “That’s a relief” before leaving. He goes back down to the main area and sees the burned woman on a stretcher. Looking at her, Cooper imagines the old woman again standing near her, staring at him. Riley finds Cooper in the hallway, and Cooper acts like he just got his credit card back. She notes how weird he’s been acting, asks if everything is okay, and if he wants to go home. He downplays it and just says that he ran into Jody’s mom again and it made him flustered. Riley says she made friends with the girls next to them, so things are already better. Now, she wants to be together with Cooper, so they can watch the rest of the concert together. Cooper agrees and goes back with her.

As Cooper’s mind races on how to get out of this while the music plays, Lady Raven is about to perform her song “Dreamer Girl”. Usually, they pick a girl right out of the audience for it to go on stage with Lady Raven. When Riley mentions how the person picked gets to go backstage too, the wheels start turning for Cooper. He sneaks over and talks to a worker (Shyamalan) about how all the teenagers there are so devoted to Lady Raven that she could start a cult. He mentions how it must be something to be that loved. The worker reveals that he’s Lady Raven’s uncle, so Cooper points out Riley being elated to be there. He lies and tells the worker Riley just recovered from leukemia and has been through a lot but doesn’t want anyone to know about it. Cooper goes on about how they are nobodies but tells the worker to thank Lady Raven for them. With this, the worker asks what seats they are in. Following this, more cops move in on the floor and Cooper sees another man being taken in for questioning. The worker interrupts him and Riley and asks Riley if she’s willing to be Lady Raven’s “Dreamer Girl”. Riley can’t believe it and accepts wholeheartedly. They are given backstage passes, and the worker tells the cops Cooper and Riley are fine and they are with them. They are brought to the back of the stage during one of Lady Raven’s songs, and the tour manager details the rundown for Riley. Lady Raven will announce the song and invite Riley on stage where she will stand in a specific spot and dance. She’s excited but nervous, so Cooper calms her down. He looks off into the distance though and spots Grant scouring the crowd. Lady Raven brings Riley on stage for “Dreamer Girl”, and the crowd goes crazy. Jody’s mom and Jody can’t believe it and start arguing with each other. In this moment, the tour manager tells Cooper that his daughter will never forget this day.

Well, she’s correct in more ways than one.

My Thoughts:

Trap is yet again another divisive feature stemming from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan. It’s something he can’t escape at this point, but the filmmaker shouldn’t be surprised either. Though the risk-taking in his stories is commended, as are the premises he comes up with, his execution continues to be flawed all these years later. Despite an intriguing idea of following a serial killer husband and father trying to avoid being caught in a seemingly inescapable situation and star Josh Hartnett stepping outside the box with an unexpected performance, the film falters under its weight. The viewer will try to suspend their disbelief to get into the movie, but some of the content, dialogue, and characters are so laughably corny and lacking common sense or realism of any kind that it becomes difficult to fully comprehend the experience.

Again, M. Night Shyamalan does a solid job in the first half of the movie with his world-building, setting up the protagonist well under the circumstances he creates with this well-thought-out concert trap by an FBI profiler who knows what she is doing. This is a serial killer with a family, and this “Girl dad” is trying to take his daughter out for a concert with no ulterior motives other than wanting her to enjoy her night out. Seeing this story all through the killer’s perspective is a very intriguing way to tell the story, as he’s the main character we are following, but we don’t want to root for him either because of his secret life. You can’t help but admire the idea as a fan of cinema. It’s different, and the first half does a decent job at trying to keep the audience engaged, as the intelligent Cooper figures out ways to manipulate situations without becoming a suspect and listening in to what the FBI profiler Josephine Grant is saying as she’s trying to telegraph his moves before he does them due to her own experience. Every time they go back to Grant’s words, it’s like the screenwriter is letting the audience know where they are at in the story like a narrator, explaining Cooper’s innermost thoughts. The lack of subtlety in displaying this to the viewer is rather obvious but not necessarily a breaking point (“One of you is going to be talking to the Butcher in the next 20 minutes. You may count on it”). That comes later. At first, the most difficult thing for us to wrap our heads around is Josh Hartnett’s performance as Cooper. It might be a movie with a mainstream, mid-level budget, but Hartnett chooses to act as if he’s in a character in a 1980s, horror, B-movie cult classic. It’s purposely corny, but it’s so hard to buy into that it feels dumb. Really, it’s not until a second viewing of Trap that Harnett’s intention with his performance clicked, as it was his way of portraying the energy of a serial killer, who also acts overtly nice to the point of patronization with his daughter Riley and everyone else he interacts with that. In doing so, it maintains the separate lives he lives as a killer and those who only know him as the happy-go-luck fireman and loving husband and father.

It’s almost unrealistic in the way he tries to be a teddy bear with a smile on his face at all times, but really, it’s Hartnett’s way of making Cooper overcompensate on this end to avoid being suspected as the psychotic monster he is in private.

If you walk into Trap blindly, you will come to the same conclusion of “What the fuck is he doing? This is comically bad”. However, the second viewing of Trap will make you realize this was actually just a daring choice by Hartnett as the actor, trying to make Cooper an entirely different villain than what we’re used to, emulating a B-movie killer known as the Butcher in a moder film as he manically tries to act like what Cooper would think a normal husband and father would be while interacting with his family. It doesn’t pay off, but I do see it now. The only way this could have been appreciated a lot better would be if the rest of the movie just wasn’t as cringeworthy as he was. Some have said that it’s tongue-in-cheek in style, but it’s hard to buy into this theory. Some of these people just aren’t real. If you were a fan of this movie and played it for a friend, you’d be embarrassed at some of its content, especially its outrageous dialogue. For instance, Jamie taking a liking to Cooper with how he handles the t-shirt situation with Riley, letting the other girl have it does make sense, but what he says to the two of them about the values a family shares just isn’t how human beings talk. The scene in which he lets Cooper come back with him into storage, regardless of how unrealistic a worker letting a stranger at a concert follow him into storage during a shift is, only happens to get the characters to the next step. Jamie not being able to grab the box of concert tees, Cooper grabbing it for him, and Jamie somehow being amazing saying, “Bro, you’re strong!” comes off as absolutely ridiculous. It’s a box of fucking t-shirts, dude. If he said it sarcastically it could work, but he was dead serious and amazed at his strength. M. Night Shyamalan himself isn’t immune to it either. In his small but pivotal role, he tells Cooper that he’s Lady Raven’s uncle and then proceeds to tell him what an uncle is, as if he is unfamiliar with the term! This isn’t tongue-in-cheek anymore. It’s flat-out fucking stupid! Considering Cooper has been on planet Earth and has family members, he knows what the fuck an uncle is! This atrocious dialogue would make sense for Cooper to say because he is trying to assimilate and act like he’s normal around other people. His delivery is weird, so it could work in doubling down on Hartnett’s acting choices.

On the other hand, if everyone acts this alien-like to normal situations with over-the-top dialogue and weird, unrealistic reaction to match it, how does this not all come off as an unintentional joke?

Everything is off, not just Cooper, and it makes the entire movie look cheap, complete with the cast and production design too. What starts off as an intriguing psychological thriller that has the potential of being something special, turns into a moronic and unbelievable series of events that only exists to keep the main character going when some of the stuff that happens is legitimately impossible to pull off. No one is asking for every movie ever to be bogged down by realism because we know we are watching a movie and want to escape into the world the director has put together. However, this is a case-by-case basis. For a movie such as Trap to focus on logic and reasoning to get to the second half of the movie and then throw it all out the window later is where you lose everyone. Instead of coming up with creative scenarios for Cooper to show either how good he is or how thrilling the movie can be, Shyamalan instead just makes him the luckiest guy ever in some of the things that happen. When Cooper has Lady Raven in the car in his garage, escaping with her as his prisoner following the news being public and people tracking her live feed to save Spencer (“You can choose to be good Cooper and make everyone proud. The way you used to when you were little. Sometimes you did good things”), her dumbass goes out of her way to remind Cooper that she has GPS on her phone, and they’ll know where they are. Cooper’s immediate response is obvious in that they will just throw her phone out the window in a mile or two. In a situation like this, why would ANYONE remind the killer of their one, last-ditch saving grace as if the problem couldn’t easily be solved by her phone just being tossed out the window? I’m not saying I would react well under the same circumstances, but no one would be dumb enough to willingly remind the bad guy of the one thing that could stop him. I refuse to believe otherwise. This is just one of the many examples of Shyamalan’s awful dialogue only existing to explain every detail as to why the story goes in a certain direction and to show why the audience’s logic doesn’t work, rather than the conversation evolving naturally. It’s helpful when Cooper explains the existence of his safe houses to Lady Raven as vacant buildings that are abandoned because of fire code violations because of the way it flows in their conversation and how Cooper has been talking to Lady Raven up until that point.

Nevertheless, it’s pure dribble in a situation for the character in danger to REMIND the villain herself of a way to stop her from being saved.

To add to the impossibilities in the second half of the movie, Grant shows up with the rest of the FBI, and they secure the house. Cooper is shown in the house meticulously cleaning everything, which would waste a lot of time, right? Even if Cooper does have an escape route, the amount of time it takes for them to break in (not long at all) to Cooper deciding to pull out cleaning supplies to clean the house (long), to Lady Raven being extracted from the house and getting a driver for her limo (not long at all), with Cooper somehow managing to sneak into the driver’s seat doesn’t add up mathematically. There is no way in Hell the entire location is surrounded by the FBI, and Cooper still finds a way to be undetected in exiting from an escape route (in which the outlet isn’t shown by the way because we would obviously have questions about that) and entering the limo of a pop star without running into ANYONE on the side of law enforcement, despite them flooding the inside and outside of the property. As your blood boils in the midst of the bullshit, the breaking point comes when the limo is mobbed by fans, and it forces Cooper to stop the car momentarily. Once Lady Raven is able to roll down the window to ask for help and eventually escape her being handcuffed by breaking the rail they were attached to, it’s basically known by everyone that Cooper is in the car. The hundreds of people completely surrounding the limo know something is wrong, and the FBI is right there as well. Can someone tell me how in the fuck Cooper escapes in this moment? He’s not a magician or someone with superhuman powers, so for him to escape from this limousine with hundreds of onlookers when he was the ONLY ONE in the car once Lady Raven escaped is cockamamie bullshit too implausible for even the biggest fan of Shyamalan’s work! Look at the details and explain to me how this can be taken in any other way other than being insultingly stupid. In this moment, everyone is mobbing the car, looking through the windshield, and completely surrounding it. Even if Cooper is wearing a disguise, he would have to be spotted opening the door, getting out of the car, and trying to escape in the crowd.

How is there not one singular person in this mob of fans that notices or shouts out Cooper for exiting the car, especially after Lady Raven already yelled for help and escaped from the fucking car in handcuffs in front of all of them. Also, the fans don’t leave the scene to chase after Raven to ask what’s happening. They stay there. They would have to see Cooper exit the car. It would be impossible not to based off where they are standing. The only way the writer can make sense of this is to have all the fans chase after Lady Raven when she ran away, allowing Cooper to use the crowd as a shield to run down an alley or something. However, this still wouldn’t work because the FBI is there and they shoot out the tires on the fucking limo. They had eyes on the car the whole time and have trained professionals chasing Cooper, so they can’t mess this up! On top of all of this, they double down and want us to believe that not only did Cooper implausibly escape into the crowd that was centimeters away from him, but he also managed to change his clothes to look like a civilian! There’s no way this could have happened! This is just Shyamalan writing himself into a corner with the scene he created and asking and hoping for the audience to take this leap into the land of zero logic and realism to continue his dumb movie! In no way could this possibly happen. The sequence is total garbage. The movie was over right then and there. Then, you want us to believe that Cooper had enough time to switch clothes and prop up the SWAT gear in the driver’s seat without anyone noticing? Has anyone ever changed in a car seat before? You’re trying to tell me all of that movement went completely unnoticed by all of those people? There is no shot in hell. It just can’t happen. On top of that, for the balls Lady Raven showed in Cooper’s house, locking herself in the bathroom, going live on her feed, and outing Cooper to the rest of his family, why wouldn’t she out Cooper as soon as she got out of the limo? She already showed the bravery she has and how well she tests him, so the logical next step of her escape from the backseat would be for her to point and yell at the crowd that the Butcher is in the driver’s seat. Considering how far she’s already taken things, Lady Raven running away in that moment where they essentially got him doesn’t fit her already unbelievable character arc.

The quality of the third act is just putrid. The movie reaches its peak with Lady Raven in Cooper’s house interacting with his family, but it just gets worse and worse after the FBI are called in. Rachel’s kids being situated with her sister, and her refusing Grant’s offer of the family as a whole getting put in a safe house because she doesn’t want to be around people is outrageous. She’s supposed to be a loving mother but doesn’t want to be with her kids because she doesn’t want to be around people? What? Does no one else find that line audacious? (SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS) One could argue it’s for her to set up Cooper in the climax, but it’s even harder for us to believe in Rachel seeing his reappearance coming, let alone coming up with a plan to stop him. No one is talking about her setting up the titular trap in the first place, as the reasoning behind her getting there is sound. Actually, her talking about how surprisingly good Cooper was at lying to a random neighbor was a great statement to add to her line of thinking. What we’re discussing is her setting up a one-on-one situation too risky for a character like that to pull off believably. What’s even weirder is Cooper taking off his shirt off while he correctly assumes how she broke into his private safe house to look for clues. In addition, I have no idea why they gave Cooper a son if he did not change the circumstances of the movie at all, and the begging-for-a-sequel ending was also groan-inducing as it again could NOT be possible given the circumstances. It just leads you to walk out of the movie angered in its audacity.

For the record, the peak of curiosity hits when Cooper gives up trying to do things discreetly, tells Lady Raven the whole deal, and how she has to help them get out of the arena unscathed, showing her the trapped Spencer on his phone. Had Trap featured a more dynamic actress instead of Shyamalan’s real-life daughter, this could have been the massive moment it should have been. Unfortunately, she just kind of stares at Hartnett with her gigantic eyes. She tries to go for the understated emotional approach because the character is shocked to near silence, but she’s not able to convey it in a satisfactory manner. This is a scene in which the whole movie changes. It goes without saying that a veteran actress wouldn’t have blown it in the way Saleka did. In Saleka’s defense, she still plays the role of a pop star well since she’s one in real life, the soundtrack she made for the film fits the character and type of pop star she’s trying to be, and her performance does win us over as time moves on and she’s given more to do. As previously mentioned, the balls she has in taking things straight to Cooper’s house makes her a near hero of the movie. Watching Cooper almost squirming seeing how far she’s going in revealing things to his family and her quick-thinking under pressure was one of the most entertaining sequences of the movie (“What a stressful day you must have had! You must be tired. Don’t feel like you have to stay here to be polite!”). It’s too bad she’s forgotten about in the last twenty minutes of the movie because she becomes the most likable character. She just exits the picture and never returns, despite playing such a crucial role to the story and the entertainment value of it once she gets involved.

An element of Trap that was done well was getting into the mind of the killer. Cooper’s belief in his ability to keep his two lives separate to where he’s two different people and how he still thought he could have pulled it off was genuinely interesting. The only reason he starts to lose is because of people trying to make the cross over. When Cooper sees his family outside in front of the garage after he locked them upstairs and him realizing they climbed the tree to get out, his own fixation on keeping things separate blinded him from seeing this possibility, as he never looked at his own home through this lens due to his own mantra of never letting the two lives touch. That was a great way to explain the psyche of this serial killer, along with Lady Raven revealing the interesting factoid that the OCD-having killer would probably have a dark-colored car because it would appear cleaner. That makes sense. It’s a great detail, and I never would have thought of it, so kudos to Shyamalan for this point. Still, watching Cooper differentiate himself from the Butcher, as he explains things to Rachel, arguing that they could have made it work was an attention-grabbing monologue, even if it was too late into movie to save it. It’s only in the climax where he feels rage and pure anger, but it’s because he won’t get to see his kids grow up. Hearing a speech like this from a serial killer protagonist is wild. Maybe it’s true. Maybe he’s “not all” monster. It’s what his mind is telling him, and we start to believe that he believes it. Really, the biggest positive of Trap is Cooper’s arc being an intriguing take on perspective and how it’s different for everyone. There’s this and the visions of his mother and Cooper’s heartfelt and harrowing reveal where he thought he was pretending but now realizes he wasn’t. Man, if Shyamalan did more of this with the screenplay instead of having Riley say slang like, “These seats slap, dad. Thank you!” in an effort to make it seem like he has his finger on the pulse of current trends, he may have had something worth seeing.

Some intentional humor like the Instagram live comments completely disregarding Lady Raven’s pleas for help like, “She’s sooo pretty” and “This seems serious” were hilarious because that it was an accurate depiction of a live feed’s comments in this era of social media. Kid Cudi as the Thinker demanding Lactaid milk in his dressing room over whole milk because he’ll shit himself along with him looking with the “Fuck-me eyes” at Cooper when he sees him in the hallway backstage was amusing, and Cooper following his delivery of the stakes to Lady Raven with “His name is Spencer, he’s 22 years old, and he’s into sustainable agriculture” was great. Along with this, you can’t help but laugh when Cooper tries to downplay the horrible revelations to his family by still giving them advice (“Rachel, the water heater guy is coming on Tuesday. Don’t let him trick you into buying a new one. It works fine”).

The odd angles, the off-kilter close-ups, and half frames all work together to make Trap feel off in its presentation, magnified by Josh Hartnett’s performance which works as a psycho killer trying to act normal but is also still too silly to fully buy into. Trap‘s biggest positive other than decent suspense is its idea, but M. Night Shyamalan thinks the screenplay is too intelligent for its own good. In reality, the low-quality production is only half-thought-out, trapping the potential of the movie with a series of idiotic plot points, tripe and unrealistic details, lame and contrived situations, full-on ridiculousness, and some of the dumbest fucking characters of the year. If Shyamalan leaned into the dark humor more or fine-tuned the other elements to keep it grounded and serious, it may have worked. As it stands however, Trap will annoy and frustrate more than it will be appreciated.

Add this to the list of Shyamalan blunders, not the list that includes The Sixth Sense.