Trap ~ Review

When I was growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s, it seemed like every week a new high-concept thriller was cranked out. There’s a bomb on a bus and if it goes above 50 miles per hour it explodes! An FBI agent must switch his identity with a terrorist! A serial killer murders people mimicking the seven deadly sins! I think it’s a shame that these types of movies have gone by the wayside with a notable exception being M. Night Shyamalan – the last bastion of the high-concept thriller. His films always have fun hooks that draw you in. What if dead people don’t know they’re dead (The Sixth Sense)? What if a superhero was a real person (Unbreakable)? What if a beach made you age quickly (Old)? Trap, Shyamalan’s latest, follows the grand tradition of high-concept thrillers but doesn’t quite stick the landing. Some very minor spoilers follow, but nothing that hasn’t been revealed in the trailers.

It's a big day for Riley (Ariel Donoghue). Her dad, Cooper (Josh Hartnett) has awarded her good grades with two tickets to mega popstar Lady Raven’s (Saleka Shyamalan) sold-out concert. It’s going to be a fun father-and-daughter day out. As Cooper and Riley head toward their seats, Cooper notices increased security and a large police presence around the stadium. When the doors are blocked and police officers won’t let anyone leave, Cooper starts to get worried. Cooper is living two separate lives, you see. In one, he’s a fireman and dedicated family man to his daughter, wife (Alison Pill), and young son (Lochlan Miller). And in his other life…he’s the serial killer known as “The Butcher” who kidnaps his victims and takes them to a safe house and brutally mutilates them. Cooper’s worry is heightened even further when he learns from an overly friendly vendor (Jonathan Langdon) that the entire concert is a trap to catch the Butcher. With a stadium full of SWAT officers and an FBI Profiler (Hayley Mills) hot on his trail, can Cooper get out of this concert without getting caught or worse…his daughter finding out who he really is?

Trap is a lot of fun. The cat and mouse game in the stadium is so suspenseful at some moments it reminded me of the opera house sequence in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. And even though there’s very little in the way of action, the tension is palpable thanks to Josh Hartnett’s chillingly affable performance as he evades detection and desperately tries to figure out a way to escape. Shyamalan keeps the audience on their toes. He also does a neat trick of switching up his protagonist for each act -- which isn't as jarring as it sounds, but to get into this would be a big spoiler. However, I think the film loses some steam when the story switches locations from the concert. It starts making Cooper’s abilities to escape feel more like a Batman villain than a real human being. Don’t get me wrong, Trap is still good during these stretches. It’s still of full of tension and atmosphere, but moving away from the concert, takes some teeth out of the premise.

The cast is great across the board. Josh Hartnett is fantastic as Cooper, playing an affable dad trying to understand new slang and bond with his daughter in one moment, and then turning into a cold-blooded killer in the next. What’s even more shocking, is that Hartnett manages to give Cooper a shade of pathos an actual heart where it’s clear he cares about his family.

Ariel Donoghue is lovely playing a perfectly ordinary teenage girl, and I completely bought her excitement at going to the concert. First-time actor Saleka Shyamalan (the writer/director’s daughter) is very good at playing a pop star, and the music she wrote for the film feels like credible pop songs from a megastar, while not being too intrusive.  It’s always great to see Alison Pill and her housewife character brings warmth and normalcy to an outlandish premise. Hayley Mills is good as the FBI profiler, and while she isn't in the film much her distinctive voice is heard throughout. It's a meta-joke casting Mills as in this film she is literally trying to trap a parent. Jonathan Langdon’s T-shirt vendor brings much-needed levity to the film and nearly steals the movie in his brief scenes.

Trap is a great entry in the high-concept thriller oeuvre. And showcases that Shyamalan is still a master of suspense. And while it doesn’t sustain its premise as well as I would have liked, it’s still a thrillingly tense ride.

Two and a half out of three stars