Pop music really can change your life. That\u2019s part of the setup of M. Night Shyamalan\u2019s near-miss of a thriller \u201cTrap,\u201d a movie that actually feels less like the Night Brand than a lot of his twisty ventures, a sort of pared down version of what he does that needed a round or two more of fleshing out its best ideas and amplifying its visual language. Night is at his best when he has a team of craftspeople to help elevate his best ideas in films like \u201cThe Sixth Sense,\u201d \u201cOld\u201d (a movie that has really grown on me), and \u201cThe Village,\u201d but \u201cTrap\u201d too often lacks the craftsmanship it needs to crackle with energy and tension. Despite these missteps, Josh Hartnett almost makes \u201cTrap\u201d worth seeing, imbuing his character with a playfulness that can be captivating. It\u2019s just a shame his great work sometimes feels trapped in a movie that doesn\u2019t know what to do with it.<\/p>\n
The majority of \u201cTrap\u201d unfolds at a place that can be truly terrifying for a parent forced to spend hundreds of dollars on the latest pop superstar. In this case, it\u2019s Lady Raven, played by Night\u2019s daughter Saleka Shyamalan, a pop star shaped in the image of someone like Taylor Swift \u2013 one of those performances wherein the average age in the crowd is in the teens, and everyone knows all the words. Saleka wrote and performed most of the music, and there\u2019s bluntly just a bit too much of it, especially because it\u2019s not quite as catchy as T. Swift. <\/p>\n
Attending this Lady Raven show in Philly is an average guy named Cooper (Hartnett) and his teen daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue). Shortly after their arrival, and with minimal character development,\u00a0Cooper notices a strong police presence at the venue, including heavily armed men at all the doors. Through a brief act of politeness, he earns the trust of a vendor (Jonathan Langdon) who lets him on a secret \u2013 the cops and feds are there because they know that a notorious serial killer named The Butcher is in the building. Cooper is that man.<\/p>\n
Their plan to stop every man who leaves the building and basically put them in front of ace profiler Dr. Grant (a woefully miscast Hayley Mills) to determine guilt makes absolutely no sense, but people buy a ticket for a movie like \u201cTrap\u201d knowing the premise, and Shyamalan\u2019s film gets by on its set-up for a while, largely because it allows Hartnett to shine through the opening act. Hartnett makes numerous smart, subtle choices that convey Cooper\u2019s precise personality, particularly in a sly smile that reveals how much this sociopath is kind of enjoying the unexpected challenge. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pop music really can change your life. That\u2019s part of the setup of M. Night Shyamalan\u2019s near-miss of a thriller \u201cTrap,\u201d a movie that actually feels less like the Night Brand than a lot of his twisty ventures, a sort of pared down version of what he does that needed a round or two more …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-1466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thriller-movies","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1466\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}