Trap (2024)
I walk into an M. Night Shyamalan movie with a certain set of expectations, not the least of which is that no matter how astonishingly stupid his plot twists turn out to be, the movie will have, at the very least, a certain level of style. He’s a good filmmaker on a technical level. He understands the levels of building tension. He creates a universe that is unpredictable and unsettling, you feel that something is quite out of whack.
I know all of that going into his latest underwhelming exercise in style simply known as Trap, but I think the LAST THING that I expected was the presence of Haley Mills. Yes, THAT Haley Mills. Parent Trap Haley Mills! When her name popped up in the opening credits I immediately assumed that it was some new 20-something actress with the same name. But NO. Three-quarters of the way through, Pollyanna herself shows up as an FBI profiler.
I’m ambivalent as to her role here. She’s not in the movie save for a few brief scenes and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I can’t determine the level of her performance because there’s not much to determine.
So, why am I spending so much of my writing space on Haley Mills? I think its to illustrate that no matter how terrible Shyamalan’s films turn out, there’s always something to take away. Believe me, I sit through enough heaps of uninspired cinematic voids to say that I’m happy when a movie, even a bad one, at least has something to grab onto.
The story here is all on the page. A middle-aged man named Cooper (Josh Hartnett, nice to see him back again) takes his teenaged daughter Riley (Ariel Donahue to a concert put on by the latest trendy teen Diva, this one the breathtakingly gorgeous Lady Raven (played by Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka) whose shows are mostly butterflies and spotlights but whose songs aren’t exactly discernable.
Cooper is here for the kid and he looks a little perplexed in that way that Dads usually look when they are hip deep in their child’s interior interests. But there’s something underneath all of it. The concert itself looks a little strange with hundreds of security cameras and platoons of cops and FBI strolling about. If you’ve seen the trailer, you already know. Cooper discovers that the whole concert has been set up to nab a serial killer. If he’s in the building, there is no way he can get out without crossing John Q. Law.
Okay, let’s stop for a second. If you’re wondering how the FBI could catch a serial killer by holding a concert in hopes of catching the bastard as he’s leaving, then the movie isn’t going to provide you with a solid answer. I am not a law enforcement expert, but this seems to redefine “extraneous”. Law enforcement in this movie is not cast in a good light – The Killer is allowed to walk anywhere in the stadium, open any door, crawl through any space and have access to any portal without being asked for his identification. There is a point at which he is standing in a basement behind a huddle-up of Kevlar-cladded cops and nobody asks what he’s doing there.
That logic is perplexing for the film’s first half, of which I tried and struggled to hold on that the movie would eventually start to make sense. And then came the second half, which (SPOILERS) takes place after the concert and, through a series of events too stupid to put into words, gets Lady Raven herself to The Killer’s house. The rest of the movie is a long slide into bad movie oblivion, as characters miss obvious clues, do things that no human being on the face of the Earth would be able to do, and watch as The Killer manages to evade capture at least 15 times. Even the ending had me rolling my eyes.
It’s been 20 years since the movie-going public began to lose faith with M. Night Shyamalan after the mishap of The Village and I’ve generally held out hope that he would get back on his feet. It comes in fits and starts. I liked Unbreakable. I enjoyed The Visit. I could care less about Glass. Old was fine. And now Trap is a special kind of terrible. Shyamalan is like a bad relationship that you keep going back to hoping that somehow he’s redeemed himself only to find him going back to his old shenanigans. I’m not done with him yet, but Trap doesn’t exactly help. By the end of this movie, I was wishing that Haley Mills would have turned out to be the killer. Now THAT would have been a twist!
About the Author: Jerry Roberts
Jerry Roberts is a film critic and operator of two websites, Armchair Cinema and Armchair Oscars. 
