Crap 'Trap'

M. Night Shyamalan’s latest suffers from severe structural issues, among other things.

Writer/director M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap has many issues, like difficult-to-swallow plot contrivances, a failure to capitalize on multiple dramatic opportunities, and Shyamalan’s infamously stilted dialogue.

But its biggest problem, by far is its structure.

Narrative structure is important for a myriad of reasons, not least of which is this: when the structure is out of whack, the movie feels long. See, your brain understands story structure, whether you’re consciously thinking about it or not; it knows, from being told millions of stories throughout your lifetime, when it’s just getting ramped up, when it’s hit the midpoint, and when it’s winding down. But when the structure hasn’t been well thought out, your brain suddenly has no idea where the hell it is within the story, it gets, well, antsy, like a kid in the backseat of a long car ride asking “Are we there yet?”. The movie could end in five minutes or five hours. That’s why although Trap is relatively brief 105 minutes, it feels like it lasts about seven hours.

The basic premise of the film - and I’m not telling you anything here you won’t learn from watching the trailer - is that a father, Cooper (Josh Hartnett), takes his teenage daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to see her favorite popstar in concert. Once they’re seated and the concert begins, however, Cooper notices an unusually-high level of security, with police officers stationed at nearly every exit to the arena, and cops going around the crowd and inexplicably pulling adult men from their seats. Cooper befriends one of the venue’s merch salespeople, Jamie (Jonathan Langdon), and gets him to spill the beans: the FBI has learned that a serial killer known as “The Butcher” is attending the show, and has thus turned the entire concert into a - you guessed it! - trap to apprehend him. Which is a real problem for Cooper, because as it turns out, he’s the Butcher. So now Cooper has to figure out a way to get the hell out of the arena without getting caught and without tipping off his daughter that he’s, y’know, a homicidal lunatic.

That’s not a bad set-up for a thriller; it’s like the sequence in Psycho where Norman Bates has to cover up Marion Crane’s murder stretched to feature length (and in case there’s any doubt that Psycho was an influence here, Cooper, we quickly learn, has serious mommy issues). It has a lot of room to play out as a clever cat-and-mouse game, and it can potentially struggle with an issue all parents have to confront at some point (in a very heightened manner, obviously), which is what parts of the authentic self one can and cannot share with their children. We’re rooting for Cooper to get away, not because we think he’s a good guy (he obviously isn’t), but because he seems like a legitimately good dad, and the possibility of Reilly learning that he tortures and murders people is earnestly heartbreaking.

Does Shyamalan do this excellent premise justice? Not really: Trap isn’t nearly so clever as it would have been in Hitchcock’s hands, and the ways in which Cooper avoids getting caught often feel laughably easy (and therefore dramatically unsatisfying). Still, the movie more or less hums along as a serviceable-enough entertainment for its first half, and I admit, I was genuinely curious to see how the story would resolve itself.

Thing is, the movie goes completely off the rails in its second half, and without giving anything away, I can tell you that this is due to its wonky structure. Trap becomes not one, but two completely separate movies from the killer-in-an-arena bit, and each of those separate movies has its own protagonist who we have not previously met. There are ways to make that kind of bait-and-switch work - once again, I direct you to Psycho - but Shyamalan hasn’t figured them out. Put another way: Psycho and Brian De Palma Hitchock homages like Dressed to Kill and Sisters switch gears partway through yet still feel like they’re one movie, but Trap comes off like one movie and two sequels. You know when you see a film that feels like it has multiple endings? Well, Trap reaches a point where it’s almost nothing BUT endings. Return of the King has nothing on this movie.

Because Trap is a Frankenstein’s monster with its pieces improperly stitched together, it loses its grip on the viewer, allowing them to ponder its myriad plot conveniences, go-nowhere set-ups, and missed opportunities (if you think Shyamalan is actually going to explore the inherent duality of parenthood, prepare to be disappointed). Yeah, Signs seems pretty silly after the fact (how the hell did the aliens fail to anticipate water as a problem?), but in the moment, it has the audience so wrapped around its finger that they don’t think about its ridiculousness. Trap, on the other hand, will make you want to shout “Are you fuckin’ kidding me?!” at the screen many, many, MANY times before it’s over.

That’s a shame, not least of all because it squanders a solid cast that includes Alison Pill, Hayley Mills (!!!), and, of course, Hartnett. Hartnett has always been handsome and charismatic, but his earliest roles, in movies like Pearl Harbor and The Faculty, didn’t require much of him beyond being broody and good-looking. But somewhere along the way, he turned into a damn fine actor (see: Oppenheimer), and his excellent, multifaceted performance is ultimately the only reason to see Trap. In fact, it’s kind of embarrassing to watch Shyamalan’s daughter, Saleka Shyamalan, who plays the popstar headlining the concert, act opposite Hartnett; she wrote all the tracks her character performs, and while she seems like a serviceable enough singer/songwriter, she is an abysmal thespian. Like, maybe not Sofia Coppola-in-The Godfather Part III awful, but still noticeably out of her depth.

Shyamalan’s career has been fascinating because he’s equally capable of making great movies like The Sixth Sense and dismal garbage like The Happening. Trap falls somewhere in between those extremes, but edges close enough to The Happening end of the spectrum to make it eminently skippable.