Post by Dracula on Aug 6, 2024 7:58:07 GMT -5
Trap(8/1/2024)
Beyond that the movie is just kind of ridden with plot holes and contrivance. Through much of the movie the protagonist seems to be able to get people to completely bend backwards to help him and I think the idea is supposed to be that this is just a function of him being this super charismatic and manipulative guy who can get people to bend to his will, but I just don’t think either Shyamalan’s dialogue or Hartnett’s performance really sold these scenes as intended and Shyamalan really doesn’t make the twisted mind of his protagonist feel particularly authentic or interesting. On the plus side, I do think the film took a couple risks in terms of genre and structure that were interesting. There’s a bit of a perspective shift the movie takes at about the halfway point that I do think it pulls off and the movie starts to work a lot better for a stretch there. I would also say that the father/daughter dynamic in the opening parts before the thriller elements take off felt pretty realistic and the “nepo-baby” aspects of the project were less of a detriment than they could have been. I didn’t find Saleka Shyamalan that believable as a world conquering pop star and the music she wrote for the movie is decidedly “mid” but when the singer becomes a more direct player in the story at a certain point she mostly holds her own well enough as an actress and wasn’t that much of a distraction. Beyond that, I don’t want to give the impression that this is too big of a failure. It works sporadically as intended and is mostly watchable. Shyamalan has made much worse movies in the past but I still don’t really count this as a success, it just botches too much and has a bit too many questionable Shyamalan-isms and kind of feels like a wasted opportunity.
**1/2 out of Five
M. Night Shyamalan’s first unabashed commercial failure as a major filmmaker was the 2006 film Lady in the Water, an intensely strange film about a man finding himself immersed in a weird story involving “Narfs” and “Scrunts” invading his apartment complex’s swimming pool, was reportedly based on a bedtime story that Shyamalan would tell to his kids. When that movie crashed and burned commercially and critically people thought “well, maybe fatherhood just led him on a strange lark” but the issues with his filmmaking trajectory did not go away as he moved on to more adult projects. Shyamalan has, however, remained fairly interested in turning his filmmaking career into a family affair and as his daughters have grown up he’s kept them involved in his work behind the scenes and this seems to have culminated in the summer of 2024 with a pair of projects that seem to have had slightly nepotistic intentions. First there was The Watchers a film fits into his overall brand and was produced by him but was directed by his twenty four year old daughter Ishana Night Shyamalan. That movie was not great but I would say wasn’t an embarrassment either, the younger Shyamalan was certainly competent behind the camera but the movie she was making didn’t entirely work and has been pretty quickly forgotten. Now we have another Shyamalan project, this one directed by the man himself but which seems heavily designed to be a musical and acting showcase for another of his daughters, Saleka Shyamalan, who has a heretofore not overly successful career as an R&B singer. That film, Trap, probably has more commercial upside than The Watchers but from where I sit it’s kind of a toss-up as to which of the movies is better.
Trap opens with a man named Cooper (Josh Hartnett) escorting his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to an arena for a mid-day concert being performed by a major pop star who goes by the name Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan). The two get into the building and find their seats but along the way Cooper starts noticing an unusual number of police in and around the building and starts to wonder what’s going on. We see early on that he has some sort of live video on his cell phone of someone tied to a chair and it would seem he has some reason to be afraid of talking to police. Eventually he starts chatting with a merch vendor (Jonathan Langdon) and learns on the down low that the whole concert is a sting operation: they’ve learned that an infamous local serial killer uncreatively dubbed “The Butcher” will be attending the show and they’ve closed off all exists in hopes of interrogating everyone in the building who fits the killer’s profile in hopes of capturing him. Frightened, Cooper realizes he needs to scope out this whole situation and try to find means of getting past security and escaping this place but it’s going to take some incredible ingenuity to pull such an escape off.
The basic high concept here, of someone essentially needing to escape from a Taylor Swift concert undetected, has some potential. I’m not exactly sure I find this scenario plausible, firstly because I have my doubts that a pop star would agree to such a situation and secondly because I don’t think it’s actually legal or possible for the police to conduct that many random searches on people… I don’t think what they have constitutes probable cause, but it is something I’m willing to play along with for the purposes of a thriller. The bigger issue with this concept is, well, it implicitly requires you to empathize with and hope for the escape of a literal serial killer. This isn’t something that’s impossible to overcome necessarily, if a filmmaker is willing to be particularly perverse or particularly empathetic there probably are ways to pull such things off but I’m not sure this movie does. Unlike Kevin Costner in the comparable No Way Out we don’t have any good reason to think this guy is innocent, nor do we get the sense that he’s reformed or that he had some sort of good reason to commit his crimes. I’m guessing that Shyamalan rather over-estimated how much good will the fact that this guy seems to genuinely love his daughter would buy with the audience or maybe he just thought that Josh Hartnett would have enough magnetism to make audiences like the unlikable but I’m not sure why he would have expected that given that Josh Hartnett is and always has been a mediocre at best talent who is not worthy of the comeback people seem to want to give him.
**1/2 out of Five
