Trap: When There's No Film So Bad, You Wouldn't Make It For Your Daughter
By Jim Slotek
Rating: C-minus
This has been a pretty good year to be one of M. Night Shyamalan’s daughters. For starters, young director Ishana released her fledging horror fantasy feature The Watchers, produced by her dad.
And even further into “great dad” territory, the elder Shyamalan turned his own latest feature, Trap, into practically a full concert film showcasing his pop singer daughter Saleka.
She even gets a substantial segment of the last act to, well, act. And while she clearly has a voice, Saleka’s acting has an innocence of style that only a father could truly appreciate.
Josh Hartnett and Ariel Donoghue in Trap. Daddy has a dark side.
The premise of the film is ludicrous – a serial killer, but dutiful dad named Cooper (Josh Hartnett), takes his daughter to see a Taylor Swift-like phenomenon, only to find that the FBI has uniformed agents all over the arena, prepared to act with extreme prejudice, roughly snagging and questioning every dad who fits the description (scaring the bejeezus out of their daughters in the process).
This operation is with the full co-operation of the arena management, staff and concert crew – all of whom have agreed to use 17,000 tween girls as bait for a killer nicknamed “The Butcher.”
I should mention that Philadelphia’s Tanaka Arena in Trap is actually the Rogers Centre in Toronto (interiors are Hamilton’s FirstOntario Centre). So, in a pivotal scene where people are fleeing the building, it’s easy for locals to assume the Jays have simply given up six runs in the second inning and fans are leaving in disgust.
But I digress. Trap is simply M. Night Shyamalan’s silliest movie since The Happening.
I feel like the premise came first – birthday present, maybe? – and the director used every sort of pretzel logic and coincidence to make a square script fit into a round hole.
Hartnett uses his affable we-couldn’t-afford-Ryan-Reynolds persona to great effect, looking so not-like-a-serial-killer that he can walk by law enforcement personnel and even sit in unnoticed on one of their meetings with their world-famous profiler (Hayley Mills!).
There are moments when Hartnett’s amiability plays comedically well, as when he encounters an obnoxious PTA mom (Marnie McPhail) whose daughter has snubbed his own, and she warns him not to cross her, saying, “I have a dark side.”
As for his daughter Riley, Ariel Donoghue is a good child actress with little to do for most of the movie except scream giddily at the stage and say, every so often, “Dad, are you okay? You’re acting weird.”
Still, so many of the events that eventually lead the story out of the arena seem made up the day before shooting – the surprise-ish trademark Shyamalan ending included.
Who is this guy? Why does he chop up people (other than the mother issues they offer up)? It should be noted Cooper only commits two horrible acts while at the concert, which would be him on his best behavior, I suppose.
The concert itself, which, as I say, consumes most of a movie with about a half-hour of plot, is not much of a draw. The studio didn’t pre-screen Trap for review purposes, so I saw its first screening at a theatre near me. There were no tween Swiftians or Ariana Grande fans there to catch the next rising star that is Saleka.
There were people of dad and mom age, though. They could certainly appreciate how Trap got made.
Trap. Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Starring Josh Hartnett, Saleka Shyamalan and Ariel Donoghue. In theatres now.