TRAP (2024)

 

 

 

When I saw the preview for M. Night Shyamalan’s latest offering, Trap, my first thought was how would Josh Hartnett do as the main character.  The second concern was how much of this film was going to be centered around the actual concert Cooper (Hartnett) was going to with his daughter Riley.  Riley is played by Ariel Donoghue who is a fine actress from Australia who I had never heard of before this so kudos to her for a job well done.  Hartnett (Oppenheimer, The Virgin Suicides, and Black Hawk Down) does a decent job playing both a caring and loving father (which you can tell he really is) as well as a cold blooded serial killer named The Butcher.

 

 

 

 

 

Now I didn’t know at the time that Lady Raven is played by Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka.  Saleka is also an up and coming pop singer like in the movie.  The film features lots of songs by her.  LOTS OF THEM!  OK, get it out now if you want; go ahead and yell “nepotism” and then we can move on.  Good, now that you have that out of your system I’ll say this as well, I’m not a fan of Saleka’s music.  By far she is a better actor (she has some scenes where she is not singing) than she is a pop star; to me at least.  After seeing how much concert is in this movie it proves to me the only reason this film exists is to give Saleka a jumping off point for her music career.  So for that I hope it works because as a crime drama thriller it mostly falls flat.

 

 

 

 

The films runtime is around an hour and forty-five minutes.  Probably just an hour and fifteen minutes if you take out the concert parts.  So the good scenes are very choppy and not all the non-concert scenes are good.  Some seem contrived, and way overdone.  I mean if this was such a tightly held onto secret then there are too many people who know there is a serial killer at the concert and give zero fucks about it.  Alison Pill (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Vice, and Milk) plays Cooper’s wife Rachel who isn’t even in the film until about the last thirty minutes.  Maybe thirty it might be less.  Also starring as Dr. Josephine Grant, an FBI profiler, is Hayley Mills.

 

 

 

Now I get it Hayley Mills was in The Parent Trap (the original one from the 60’s not the remake) and here we have The Butcher who is caught in a trap and he is there being a dad to his daughter so it’s essentially a trap for a parent.  *Insert audible groans here*  I’m also going to rip Shyamalan in that for the first time (at least I think it is the first time) a film he directed “appears” in Philadelphia but none of it was really filmed anywhere near the city I was born and raised near.  I’m not a Philly expert, but I friggin’ know Philly when I see it and certainly know when I don’t see it.  So I call Shenanigans on that as well.  So while I was worried about the film not all of my worries came to fruition but oh boy, the ones that do are really hard to overlook.  A while back I watched Old which is also one of Shyamalan’s films and I didn’t like it much at all but here’s the thing, it’s not my least favorite M. Night film anymore.  This is!  Two slap bracelets out of five.