"Trap" Review

 So M. Night Shyamalan has photos of the big bosses of Hollyweird committing heinous felonies (or at least really skeevy morally depraved stuff) because why else would he be allowed to make a movie of a screenplay as intrinsically terrible as the one for Trap, which at this writing has a 6.1 average score on IMDB which also indicts the stupidity of audiences while also explaining a lot of why so many politicians remain in office?

Trap stars Josh Harnett as Cooper, a fireman who's also an awesome girl dad who is taking his tween daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to see her fave pop star, Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan - one guess as to who her dad is). But as we know going in from the trailer, he's also the Butcher, an unimaginatively-named serial killer whose signature move is hacking up his bodies like a, you know, a crazy person.

But the cops somehow know he's going to be at the concert and have set a trap (roll credits!) for him by deploying a literal army of black-clad SWAT officers toting assault rifles as well as tons of regular dress cops who cover every entrance and exit. There is enough man and firepower present to knock over a moderate-sized country, so there's no way the Butcher can escape and the concert goers won't even seem to notice the armed prison vibe during the show.

Having entered Fort Hockey Arena despite the show of force, Cooper asks a super helpful merch booth worker, Jamie (Jonathan Langdon), what all the troops are for and Jamie tells Cooper that they're there to catch the Butcher. (This is also in the trailer.) How will our plucky serial killer possibly escape?

 Well, as the great Ryan George Pitch Meeting series always says, it'll be super easy, barely an inconvenience because at every step of the way, Cooper will be able to hear the next important piece of information, either by always being right there when someone says it or conveniently listening in on a purloined walkie talkie when the FBI profiler, Dr. Grant (Hayley Mills, presumably hired because she started in The Parent Trap and Shyamalan has even less originality that we thought), broadcasts Basil Exposition infodumps.

There is so much stupid going on with Trap that it's hard to know where to start cataloging the transgressions, but the alarm bells began going off within minutes as detail after detail elicited annoyed, "That would never happen," comments from me (ahhhh, the benefits of home theater, where you can stop to heckle a movie without annoying strangers) and raising the question whether MNS ever been to a concert in his life? Does he know how anything works in reality?

During the show a guest performer emerges from the floor of the arena. The floor in the aisle opens up and a staircase emerges with the guest standing atop it before descending down to walk the floor towards the stage. There are no barricades around this chasm so anyone not paying attention could fall down into it. Many pop shows have runways that thrust out into the crowd so any guest would emerge from the stage surrounded by barricades. MNS only stages it this way because Cooper sees it as a possible escape route.

At another point Cooper manages to access an area where SWAT troops are getting a briefing about their mission so he can conveniently hear what they know about him. The concert is going on and the place is staked out. Wouldn't this briefing have been done beforehand?

Then there is a B-plot about Riley having issues with mean girls at school and Cooper repeatedly running into one of their mothers in the concourse. Did I mention that Riley keeps leaving the concert of her favorite artist to find her dad running all over? That happens when everyone knows that the only time people leave their seats is to hit the bathroom during the mid-show part of the set when the artist wants to play something off the new album or a boring ballad. NOTHING IS REAL!!!

And hoo boy there is the whole Jamie the merch guy situation where he enables so much by doing things that WOULD NEVER HAPPEN like leave his booth to take Cooper to get a t-shirt from the back area. He just gives it to him as if every item of merch isn't counted out and in to determine how much money should be in the til and to cut the venue their percentage. And he doesn't even take the rest of the box to sell at the booth! (He does get a good mid-credits callback moment.)

When Cooper's escape plan leads to him getting backstage after the most convenient pretense ever to get Riley involved with the show, the way he gets Raven to facilitate their escape hammered the OH, COME THE F*CK ON!!! meter so hard the needle bent 45 degrees. Does this big star not have an entourage, handlers, beggars and hangers-on? Why is her dressing room so sparsely done up? (Seriously, I have been in nicer green rooms as a nobody musician than this space.) How does no one notice she's taking off with some guy and his kid without comment?!?!?

Now I will admit that once he gets out of the arena with Raven, my level of interest ticked up from enraged apathy to vague curiosity whether the back half of the movie could be better? It's not and frankly indulges in new flavors of stupid leading to a twist even I saw coming and a final twist which again requires everyone to be moronic to unbelievable levels.

 Aspiring screenwriters are constantly lectured about making sure their screenplays follow basic logic, so it must be super appalling to see MNS get away with attracting a reported $30M budget for a script that with get a neophyte in a night school class advised to pursue a career in the food service or housekeeping industries. Cooper is supposed to be this brilliant psychopath, but he has every step of his dodging capture literally handed to him. He's as if Tugg Speedman wanted to make The Silence of the Lambs as his Simple Jack character.

The entire chain of events depicted would unravel if everything doesn't go totally according to the hackneyed way MNS types them out. If they didn't have all the cops in plain sight, Cooper would have suspected nothing. What kind of sting operation has massive shows of police force? Without the cops, he doesn't ask Jamie the Very Talkative Merch Dude Who Can't Keep A Secret what's going on, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. If Raven's people say, "Hey, where is she going with that guy?" then he's caught. It's maddening.

Hartnett has been having a bit of a moment lately due to his co-starring role in last year's Oppenheimer (that was the movie about making the atomic bomb, not the one about Barbie in the "Barbenheimer" double-feature) and while he tries his best with the garbage MNS typed up, his efforts are wasted. I never cared for him during his teen idol days in the late-20th/early-21st Centuries where I felt his shtick was acting like a puppy dog with caterpillar eyebrows. But now in his mid-40s, his face has filled out and he looks like Kyle Chandler's brother. (Paging casting directors!) Someone get him a good script, please.

As for the other major purpose of this dumb movie, launching Daddy's little girl's pop and acting career, Saleka Shyamalan is adequate to the task. She's perfectly fine playing a pop singer and her music is as generically bland as most of what passes for "music" these days on the Spotify charts. In the one restrained directorial choice Daddy S makes, he shoots the numerous concert segments from the point of view of Riley's seat in the arena, not up close like a concert video. So the view is filled with idiots filming on their phones and she's only really seen on the video screens.

Shyamalan has had so many career highs and lows due to his own poor choices that one could get whiplash. After a killer opening run of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village followed by a decade of Razzie Awards bait before coming back with The Visit and Split, only to piss that comeback away with Glass (seriously, screw you, Night, for that ending!) and seemingly alternative between OK and bad movies (according to my missus who watches more of them than I do), he's firmly back in the Suck Zone with Trap. Don't let him trap you into wasting 100 minutes of your life on such dumb dreck. Go watch one of his early movies instead.

Score: 2/10. Skip it.