M. Night Shyamalan movies are, to borrow from Forrest Gump, like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re going to get. If you’re lucky, you’ll get something chewy, sweet and enjoyable (The Sixth Sense, Signs, Knock at the Cabin), but if you’re unlucky, you’ll get the hazelnut whirl or that horrible one that looks like shards of glass covered in a thin layer of chocolate that makes you wish you’d gone for some fruit instead (Old, The Happening, Lady in the Water). Shyamalan’s latest, Trap, is a bit like the coffee crème – not necessarily the one you hoped for, but tasty enough in its own way.
The problem with Trap is that it’s a really good idea in search of a really good story. If you’ve seen the trailer (which gives away perhaps a little bit too much) then you’ll have a decent grasp on Shyamalan’s central idea. Philadelphia firefighter Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett) takes his excitable teenage daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a special afternoon concert by the latest pop sensation Lady Raven (Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka – who said nepotism was dead in Hollywood?) Cooper is intrigued to notice a massive and unsubtle police presence at the arena; the Police are literally everywhere. Cooper discovers from an indiscrete T-shirt vendor that the concert is a trap for the notorious local serial killer ‘The Butcher’ – the police have received intel that he’ll be somewhere amongst the crowd. But of course, Cooper is The Butcher, hiding in plain sight, and he starts to work his way around the arena, trying to find a safe escape route for himself and his daughter despite the armed police at every doorway and even up on the roof.
Trap is a prime piece of Shyamalan misdirection that does at least play its hand quite early, but it doesn’t have the courage of its convictions. Shyamalan is clearly unfamiliar with arena concert etiquette – Cooper is constantly slipping away from his daughter and the crowd to case the joint, and despite the fact that the star turn is on stage, the corridors are thronged with concert-goers, and Riley repeatedly joins him, urging him to return to the crowd in time for ‘the next song’. Any tension in the arena – where nothing much really happens except a lot of surreptitious creeping around and Cooper setting off a couple of diversions – runs out after an hour, and Shyamalan moves his dramatis personae into an entirely different location where the increasingly fanciful story becomes even more outlandish as it hurtles towards its thundering climax.
But despite all its faults – you could drive a London bus through the plot holes, and Cooper, in particular, makes one stupid decision obviously designed to give the film a bit more staying power – Trap is shamefully enjoyable. It’s good to see the underrated Hartnett back on screen, Donoghue captures the fizzing excitement of a hormonal teenager at a pop concert, and Saleka Night Shyamalan is surprisingly competent as Lady Raven, the Arianna Grande/Dua Lipa-like purveyor of modern soft pop R’n’B who finds herself out of her stage comfort zone as the film wears on. Veteran Hayley Mills adds some gravitas as the steely police profiler Josephine Grant; we may be overthinking things, but in 1961, she starred in the minor Disney family classic The Parent Trap, so surely her casting in a film where she is literally responsible for trapping a parent can’t be a coincidence.
Trap is high-class hokum, and Shyamalan (who cameos here as Lady Raven’s proud uncle) does not quite deliver on the potential tension inherent in the film’s central idea. However, if your powers of disbelief-suspension are developed enough and you can just sit back and ignore the random illogicality of it all, you may well find that it is, after all, a caramel crème from the top layer – irresistible and enjoyable but probably a bit of a guilty pleasure.
TRAP is on general release now.
