Trap

A father (Josh Hartnett) takes his daughter (Ariel Donoghue) to a huge gig she’s always wanted to go to. Soon he realises there’s an increased police presence at the stadium, and that they might be on the hunt for him.

I haven’t seen a Shyamalan film in ages now, and certainly not any of his later ‘renaissance’ stuff. This odd premise for a film caught my eye so I thought I’d dip my toe back in.

Despite what you might hear about Trap I think they were trying to have a little twist - the father turns out to be a serial killer and the police are on the hunt for him. There’s a clear ‘reveal’ moment for this, albeit quite early on in the film, but it’s all ruined by the trailer which gives it away along with a few synopses of the film I’ve seen out there. So the ‘twist’ kind of just becomes the central premise.

The premise being that the police set up this gig just to lure him there and catch him. Yeah it’s not the greatest gambit but it leads to some solid cat-and-mouse stuff in the first half of the film at least.

I’ll be honest it’s all too easy to shit on this. The bonkers idea behind the gig. The fact that the popstar is played by Shyamalan’s real-life real-popstar daughter (who is then called upon to act, and is terrible). The dialogue is written by an alien who has never met a human before. The screenplay tries to finish the story about three times before reaching the actual end. The list goes on.

But to my surprise there are more than a few bits to like. Josh Hartnett really understands the brief here, and plays the dead-behind-the-eyes smiling guy everybody loves right on the nose. I think he kind of understands that Trap is pretty much a comedy. Alison Pill is also excellent as his wife back home.

There’s also something pleasingly eerie about how Shymalan shoots this. He knows how to build tension in mundane scenarios, and there’s a real sense of foreboding in the opening scenes.

I can’t really defend Trap to all the haters that want to hate, but to suggest that this is a film with zero entertainment value at all is far too harsh.