Movie Review : Trap (2024)
My favorite thing about the band Weezer is that everyone who seems to care about them is never satisfied with whatever they might be doing. It must be crazy frustrating and heartbreaking to be Rivers Cuomo, so I feel for the guy. He's trying to organically recreate in real time what only nostalgia can do. I could never find the same sympathy for M. Night Shyamalan, but almost. He's not as talented or desperate as Rivers Cuomo, but he's also become oddly underrated even if he was never that good.
His new film Trap is also not good, but it's oddly fun and watchable? It's convoluted and nonsensical, but in a good way?
Trap tells the story of Cooper (Josh Hartnett) a serial killer and also a loving father of two who decided to take his daughter (Ariel Donoghue)to a Lady Raven (Shyamalan's daughter Saleka) concert. She's like, the equivalent of an Ariana Grande. Cooper realizes quick enough that 1) an afternoon concert is a pretty weird fucking thing.and 2) there's an egregious number of cops present at that concert. There's an FBI profiler present and she put together a bold plan to get him arrested.
How to Watch An M. Night Shyamalan Movie
You can't watch an M. Night Shyamalan movie expecting to be transported by a gripping story and nuanced characters. It doesn't work like that. His films are more of a contest between the audience and him as whether you're going to find the plot twist before he delivers it. Because there's a lot of stuff that doesn't add up in that movie. For example, Cooper is inexplicably terrified to be controlled at the exit of the arena. There are three thousand men there and he's got nothing incriminating on him cops can access to.
I mean, why would a psychopath not want to play his chances?
There's a perverse pleasure to watching Cooper get bolder and bolder in his attempt to avoid contact with police officers (as if they had a serial killer bullshit radar), like you derive pleasure from watching slashers get creative with their victims. He’s being the absolute worst dad to his daughter going all over the arena to scheme his way out, but it's adorably villainous since his daughter is a one dimensional character and that she unequivocally benefits from his antics. She's having the time of her life.
The setting is also fun, in the same way the setting of Squid Game or even American Gladiators were. It's a wacky obstacle course of life and death where only winning, humiliation or death are the outcomes. There's the obstacle course Cooper is going through, but there's another set of smoke and mirrors put together by M. Night Shyamalan to obfuscate what the fuck is actually happening to Cooper. That aspect was a little more disappointing. Shyamalan's plot twists had a limp dick here.
The movie after the movie
The most interesting part of Trap happens when the show is over and everyone has gone home. It's about twenty minutes long and it's oddly taut, awesome and free of any kind of Hollywoodian formatting. It's like three short films put next to one another. Throughout the movie, you never really buy Josh Hartnett as dangerous. I thought the Shyamalan plot twist would be that he was a crazy person imagining he was a serial killer. That would've made his interactions with Marnie McPhail so much more fun.
But once you get in his house, Cooper becomes unhinged and his reality is suddenly a lot more abstract. There's this really cool scene at the end (that I won't spoil) where symbolism and storytelling get intermeshed together to a point where I have no fucking idea what I'm looking at. It seems like it belong in another movie. Once again the end makes no fucking sense and will just frustrate you, but it's been a rollercoaster ride to get there and you can't help feeling you heart beat in your chest.
*
Although I can't get myself to say that Trap is conventionally good with a straight face, I do think it was the best M. Night Shyamalan movie I've seen since Split in 2016. It’s a collection of extremely original and daring ideas that's undermined by a stupid screenplay and lazily written characters, but it’s more feisty than a lot of movie coming out since the pandemic. I enjoyed it. I can't tell you that you will or that it's worth your time, but it's different and it has a shitload of interesting ideas.
6.8/10
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