Caught in a Web

I recently reviewed The Sixth Sense (as I go through my backlog of previously released films I haven’t discussed on this website) and as part of that review I noted that M. Night Shyamalan was at his best before he got so deep on having to have a twist on every film that it became predictable and mundane. He had a great twist in that film, and then a pretty okay twist in Unbreakable, but by Signs and then on into The Village and The Happening and so on, it just became so tedious, so expected, that every time a new film came out you were already trying to figure out what the twist was going to be before you even stepped into the theater.

For the record, I guessed the twist of The Village simply from the first promotional shot of the movie. That’s not to brag about it but to note that even by that film his twists had become lazy and tired. And yet people kept buying in, kept coming to his movies, because he was considered an auteur movie master. They kept hoping his next movie would live up to his greatest heights, and he very rarely has managed to do so.

The director found something of a late career renaissance, with fans of his works coming back for Split. That movie didn’t have much of a twist (discounting the tag ending that I won’t spoil here) and it showed that the director could really pull off legitimate filmmaking wonder if you just set himself down to do it. But M. Night gonna M. Night, and so the twists quickly came back. And that leads us into Trap, a film with a twist that comes so early even the trailers for the film spoiled it. But this is still an M. Night Shyamalan film so even when you think you’ve gotten the twist out of the way, four more are going to come along after. You’re left constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, expecting something more, something next, that it’s hard to even enjoy one of his films for the simple pleasures they provide.

It doesn’t help that his films are so bound up trying to do another twist on yet another twist that they become convoluted, insane, and pretty stupid. There are pleasures to be had in Trap, in fairness, but they don’t come from the absolutely ludicrous story. The core of the movie is rotten, betrayed by Shyamalan to constantly one-up himself as he’s writing his films.

Cooper Abbott (Josh Hartnett) is a loving husband and father who just wants to take his daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to a Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan) concert. He managed to score tickets to a second show the singer would be performing in the Philly area, and his daughter has been absolutely stoked about it even as she’s battling with a couple of shitty girls at school. They get to the concert on time, find their seats, and get settled in for a show Riley will never forget.

Except that Cooper starts to notice a lot of cops and security in the area. He begins keeping an eye out as more and more cops wander around the concert venue, and he begins to suspect something more is going on beyond just a Lady Raven concert. Chatting with a t-shirt merch seller, Jamie (Jonathan Langdon), Cooper finds out that the police and the FBI suspect that the wanted serial killer, The Butcher, is in attendance at the concert. This is their perfect opportunity to catch the guy and put him away. Problem for Cooper is that he is The Butcher and now he has to find a way to escape without alerting all of law enforcement in the process.

I would say that Trap is about fifty percent a smart movie. The early setup is interesting, with us getting to know Cooper, the dad, before it’s revealed that he’s also Cooper, The Butcher. It’s oddly humanizing in a way for the character, even if the fatherly performance is just that, a performance. The film gets us invested and involved in him as a character before it reveals that he’s also a serial killer, and then as we’re seeing him plot and plan his way out of the venue, we actually want to see if he finds a way to get away with it. The film gets us not so much rooting for the bad guy but at least curious to see how he does.

One problem here, though, is the fact that because it’s an M. Night Shyamalan you’re constantly trying to second guess the writer / director. Is Cooper the bad guy or is he a patsy? Did he get framed? Does he know who did it and he’s covering? Is he an accomplice? Watching the film I kept firing off in all directions, trying to guess where the director was going and what his plan was. Surely revealing Cooper as the bad guy this early on was a misdirect because there’s no way the film could be that obvious and that basic.

But it actually is that basic, and it only gets worse around the halfway point. This is a section where, to escape, all facade is dropped and Cooper just becomes himself. This feels like a betrayal of the character that we’ve seen up to this point, in no small part because it doesn’t really feel like a mask was properly discarded. We’ve seen a few facets of Cooper at this point, and a big reveal like this, that truly cements him as the bad guy, should be chilling. All bets should be off, he should become the monster he was meant to be… but it never happens.

Note that I don’t think the blame for this rests with Hartnett. He was hired to play a guy that could be a killer but also be a cheesy dad, and Hartnett nails the role. I think this comes down to direction, with M. Night Shyamalan not actually sure how to film a truly evil man finally becoming the monster we expect. If this were a film directed by, say, David Fincher, then the reveal would come as a true turn towards villainy. A cold spike of ice would travel down the spine of the viewers as everything we were building to came to fruition in the darkest way possible. In Shyamalan’s film, though, it barely feels like a reveal. It’s just one more step down the film’s path, on towards whatever next twist we’ll get.

I have a feeling that the reveal was meant to function like a big twist. The killer doesn’t see a way out so he reveals himself to make things happen. But Shyamalan doesn’t have the skill as a writer or a director to pull that off. And then it’s not even the last twist we get. The killer goes on a path of fake outs and misdirections that feel like the end of reels from a 1930s serial. “Oh, the villain had plunged off a cliff! However will he survive this?” and then the next week you realize he wasn’t even falling off the cliff and it was all a cheat. That’s what M. Knight does here again and again and again. It’s not interesting; it’s tiresome.

Shyamalan has a great hook with this film, make no mistake, and the first half of the film as Cooper plays a game of cat and mouse with the authorities is really fun to watch. But that’s also just an hour of the movie and it feels like the director realized he was paid to direct two hours of film and now he has to pad it out by just riffing out his ass on and on. The film turns into this shaggy dog story about the killer constantly deceiving the police and it becomes the dumbest version of itself. It loses track and completely falls apart.

I wanted to like Trap. For an hour I even thought, just maybe, Shyamalan could make something watchable. If not great, just watchable. But after that first hour it crumbles and the director goes back to his same old tricks. Shyamalan simply doesn’t have what it takes to be the next Hitchcock, and Trap, with all its idiocy and stupid twists, proves that.