Director M. Night Shyamalan is recognized for his brilliant plot twists and audience subversion. However, maybe his greatest twist of all is making audiences think that “Trap” is worth 100 minutes of their time.
“Trap” is fun for about 50 minutes of its runtime. Shyamalan delivers a captivating concept, with a serial killer being hunted down in an arena full of 30,000 people. The trailers set the situation up perfectly, and Josh Hartnett seemed like a solid pick for the lead role coming off of a career performance in 2023’s “Oppenheimer.”
One thing on the film’s short list of positives actually comes from a flaw to which Shyamalan previously has fallen prey: nepotism. Not only did he cast Jaden and Will Smith in “After Earth,” but he also got one of his daughters in the director’s chair for “The Watchers” earlier in 2024.
“Trap” features his oldest daughter, Saleka, as the concert’s main attraction, Lady Raven. Her music turns out to be a nice touch to the film’s overall atmosphere, and she turns in a decent performance for a first-time actress in her surprisingly large role. If Shyamalan casting Jaden Smith in “After Earth” sucked life out of a decent script, casting his own daughter in “Trap” breathed some life into a dull one.
On top of Saleka’s performance, both Hartnett and Ariel Donoghue work well together as a father and daughter pair. Hartnett dives into the role of Cooper with clear passion, more than the lackluster script deserved. Donoghue delivers an authentic performance, coming across as exactly the type of teenager one would expect to find at a concert like this.
Another positive is composer Herdís Stefánsdóttir’s tense and atmospheric score, which adds a darker layer to the film as a whole. This is her second time scoring for Shyamalan, and it’d be nice to see the duo continue collaborating.
The first half is a gripping, even if slightly nonsensical, roller coaster. However, if the former resembles a fun ride, the latter half feels more like driving on a bumpy and unpaved road — still getting thrown around all over the place, just without the fun. Almost all of the momentum is lost at the halfway mark, as that’s when the film goes off the rails. It not only abandons any sense of realism, but it also moves away from everything that was interesting in the first place.
Cooper’s ambiguous character is very interesting to watch when he’s reacting to dangerous situations around him in the first half. But once the story pivots to focus more on his personality and motivations, he feels far less scary or intimidating than before.
The film tries to make Cooper mysterious while keeping him at the center of the attention at the same time. The audience sees small, ambiguous pieces of his backstory, and those pieces play a large role later on. Viewers are supposed to feel bad for the character, but the backstory’s role is underexplored, thus making its prominence feel random.
For some reason, Shyamalan has had a recent inability to tell stories that end satisfyingly. If the confusing transition from the second act to the third act was the worst part of “Trap,” then things wouldn’t be so bad. But the film goes on and on with various tropes and predictable moments coming one after another.
The best twists are those that make the audience see the movie in a whole new light. However, not only do this film’s many so-called “twists” simply elaborate on the previous scene, but each one also presents a new thread that, if pulled upon, can unravel the entire movie. It’s genuinely sad to see such a coveted creative mind stoop down from the high-class level of filmmaking that he’s delivered for years to the writing and story mechanics more characteristic of a cheap Netflix original.
Overall, “Trap” works well when it’s slowly building a story that lends itself to a confined, brisk finale. However, when that finale turns out to be sprawling and drawn-out, the stakes start to lose their substance. Shyamalan has struggled recently to wrap up his stories in satisfying ways, and “Trap” may be the worst case yet.
Shyamalan has made great films, and nothing can change that. But if he continues to put out illogical duds, then it won’t just be his movies being bashed by critics, but his reputation as a filmmaker as well.
