Trap (2024)

2 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Acting in Concert

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan returns with Trap, another well-directed thriller with a lot of potential and many flaws, and its enthralling parts might, arguably, slightly outweigh the ridiculous parts.

Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett) takes his teen daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to see Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) in concert. Riley is beyond excited, getting a glimpse of the pop star as she leaves her trailer. As they enter the Philadelphia arena, Cooper begins noticing an excessive number of police officers guarding the doors.

He learns from a friendly merch seller that the authorities are after a notorious serial killer called The Butcher, who is said to be at the concert. Cooper's gears begin spinning as he tries to visualize a way out through the ultra-high-alert security. Because, it so happens that Cooper himself is the Butcher.

The concert takes up the first half of Trap, and it's quite tantalizing, an enormous, expensive puzzle-box with thousands of moving parts. Shyamalan's daughter, Saleka, a singer in real life, fully pulls off the part of a pop star, and the many teen girls at the show have all the moves and lyrics memorized. The energy is electric. When a guest performer rises out of the floor, Cooper eyeballs the elevator mechanism, thinking maybe it's an escape. We're almost complicit, almost hoping for him to solve the puzzle. But when the concert ends, his true cruelty comes out, and we realize our error.

Regrettably, the post-concert sequences feel increasingly implausible, and, worse, dragged-out. Rather than finding an end to the story, we get scene after scene of Cooper proving how much more wily and clever he is than the authorities that are after him, and how deep his inhumanity goes. (He says that he chooses his victims because they seem unbroken.) He goes from being a flawed character to an almost supernatural villain, and it's off-putting.

Thankfully, Hartnett's performance is modulated in cunning ways so that, just when he seems to teeter off balance, he rights himself again. He uses his size (he towers over all the teens at the concert) and his sinister smile as weapons, more than he uses any physical violence. Trap might have worked better had it been more streamlined, but it works well enough for a casual viewing.