The wayward if watchable “Trap” is the latest prisoner to Shyamalan’s half-measures. Set at a pop concert that doubles as an FBI operation to catch a serial killer, this cat-and-mouse game proves equal parts intriguing and illogical. But it’s the swing-and-miss attempts to imbue the escapism with depth — murky musings on compartmentalization, plus mommy and daddy issues galore — that most frustrate in a movie that repeatedly mistakes trauma for complexity.
That’s certainly true of the central psychopath Cooper (Josh Hartnett), a Philadelphia family man with an unfortunate penchant for locking up strangers and chopping them into pieces. As Cooper takes his teen daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to see the starlet Lady Raven (the director’s daughter Saleka Shyamalan) in concert, lifting Riley on his shoulders so she can glimpse her idol and endearingly trying to learn her Gen Z lingo, the dissonance poses an obvious question: What drives this father of the year to commit such heinous acts? If a hazy interrogation of his unresolved mother-son drama doesn’t sound satisfying, brace for disappointment.
Shyamalan fares better while meticulously laying out Cooper’s escape route from the titular trap. As a loose-lipped merch hawker (the amusing Jonathan Langdon) reveals to Cooper, the FBI has intel that the so-called Butcher is attending the concert, and enough of a description to pick him out of the mostly female crowd. (We’re told that only 3,000 of the 20,000-plus attendees are male — which, let it be said, still feels like a comically large number of people to sort through.) But even as Cooper scrambles to slip away and Shyamalan works overtime to drench the proceedings in dread, “Trap” is surprisingly devoid of tension whenever there isn’t a sharp object on-screen.
Coming off a bone-chilling “Black Mirror” appearance and a steely supporting turn in “Oppenheimer,” Hartnett plays Cooper with enough overzealous charm and turn-on-a-dime darkness to mostly sell the underdeveloped duality in Shyamalan’s script. Although this is the Hartnett show, each act shifts the focus to a different female character caught in his sociopathic net. The first dwells on Riley, a social pariah who finds solace in pop star idolization. The second centers on Lady Raven, whose pivot from plot device to temporary protagonist is surprisingly satisfying. And the final act confirms there was a reason the ever-dependable Alison Pill was cast in the seemingly peripheral role of Cooper’s wife.
Shyamalan mercifully resists peppering his dialogue with inhuman lyricism, as he is wont to do, though Hayley Mills is saddled with a clunker or two while playing the FBI profiler running the operation. His missteps instead come in the credulity-straining plot that begins at implausible, then stumbles into full-on preposterousness and keeps on tumbling. (I’d love to sit in on the FBI debrief with every SWAT team member who backs Cooper into a corner, then lets him get away.) Even when Shyamalan flirts with a novel idea — maybe stan culture and social media obsession are good things? — he neglects to follow through.
When considering the Shyamalan oeuvre, this concert-set film ultimately plays like a filler track — not a certifiable banger like “The Sixth Sense” or “Unbreakable,” but not exactly a clunker in the vein of “The Happening” or “Lady in the Water,” either. If you sit back and enjoy its mindless rhythms, you might have a good time. Just don’t try mining the lyrics for meaning.
PG-13. At area theaters. Contains strong language, brief violence and tween shrieking. 106 minutes.
