The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D-
My trip to the theater to see Trap marked the 10th anniversary of when I started going to the movies every week back in August 2014, when this compulsion all started with the godawful Michael Bay reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. A lot has happened in the last ten years. I got a PhD, I got married and, of course, I have watched a shitload of movies. Anyone that follows my reviews will know that there is something quite fitting about thisbeing the 10th anniversary movie. It just wouldn’t feel right to mark the occasion with a good movie, now would it? Well, don’t you worry. M. Night Shyamalan is here to celebrate with me and he brought the utterly baffling Trap along with him.
The summer Olympics just ended and, unfortunately, they failed to acknowledge the true champion of the world: whoever cut together the trailers for this fucking movie. Based on the trailers, I was actually looking forward to Trap and that’s quite an achievement because this is a complete shitshow. On paper, the concept is interesting. Josh Hartnett stars as a family man that is also a serial killer. He brings his daughter to a sold-out concert performed by popstar Lady Raven (played by M. Night’s daughter, Saleka Night Shyamalan) and he alternates between spending quality time with his daughter and checking the video feed on his phone of his latest victim, a man that is shackled to a chair somewhere. But he soon discovers that this entire concert is a massive trap; the police know that he is there and the entire arena has become a dragnet as the cops search for the killer. How did the police know that he would be there? How will he get out? Don’t worry. Those questions, and many more, will soon get the dumbest fucking answers possible.
For much of the running time, you may forget that you are even watching a thriller as you instead find yourself watching a concert film. Trap is nepotism at its finest and largely serves as a promotional piece for Saleka Night Shyamalan, who is an aspiring pop star in real life (and not the same Shyamalan daughter that directed The Watchers earlier this year). The movie frequently stops dead to showcase Saleka performing entire songs, entire fucking songs, in a bid to use the film as a launching point for her singing career. I hope you like generic, teenage-girl pop music (think Ariana Grande), because you are going to sit through a shit load of it.
When the movie does remember to attend to its own plot, that’s somehow when it really falls apart. Nothing in this movie makes any goddamn sense. Not a single thing that anyone does in this movie comes close to resembling a rational thought. Much of the first two acts alternates between the riveting musical numbers and Hartnett finding excuses to wander around the arena. The arena is on high alert and is filled with cops, who are led by an expert profiler of serial killers (played by Hayley Mills, who played Miss Bliss in the weird early episodes of Saved By the Bell). The profiler has expertly deduced that the killer is either an elderly man or a younger white man or a younger black man. So, basically, they just think it’s a man. So when Hartnett wanders around the venue, you would think people would question him, but no. Employees just invite him into backstage areas. He injuries people to create distractions, but do they go look at the security camera footage of what happened? Fuck no. Oh, strange man, you want to speak in private with the pop star? Sure, fuck it, not like we are looking for a killer or anything. Idiots. You’re all idiots.
I’m going to get into SPOILERS a bit here because it’s necessary to understand just how dumbfounding this movie is. The third act begins with Hartnett revealing himself as the killer to Lady Raven and telling her that he will immediately use his phone to kill the shackled guy by releasing poison gas if she says anything. I guess he has a phone app designed by fucking Jigsaw that allows you to release poison gas by pressing the volume button, so that’s handy. She agrees to escort him and his daughter out of the venue in her private limo. By the way, this was a matinee concert being played because the regular nighttime concert sold out in minutes, yet nobody questions that she is leaving when she has another sold-out show to do. His plan at this point is to be let out of the limo at the next corner. That’s it. She has seen him, he’s on video everywhere and his daughter was even on stage. But his escape plan is to be let off on the next corner. Our criminal mastermind, everyone.
Lady Raven then makes a series of decisions that are so hilariously dumb that I thought I was going to die. I mean that literally. At one point, she steals her phone and locks herself in the bathroom. Does she call the cops? No. Does she throw the phone in the toilet, thus disabling the Jigsaw poison gas app? No. Does she crawl out the window? Fuck no. She starts live streaming to her fans about the situation. Unfortunately, at the exact moment that she did this, I was taking a drink of my Icee and my laughter caused me to start choking and then coughing uncontrollably for the next several minutes. I was thinking that this was perfect, this was how I was meant to go out: choking to death on a blue raspberry Icee because a terrible movie made me laugh at just the right moment. Now that would be a fitting 10th anniversary.
I could go on and on about ridiculous individual scenes, but I think you get the idea. Trap has one of the worst scripts in recent memory, a script so filled with plot holes and logical gaps that any sane person would have gone mad upon reading it rather than agree to finance it. I will say that Harnett is good, the film is well shot and it wasn’t a terrible theater experience. My audience was laughing quite a bit; quietly at first, but uproariously during the absolutely ridiculous final act. So I had a better time watching this than I did with Night Swim or Imaginary. But that is the only way to watch this movie: with a group of people, preferably drunk, laughing their asses off at the disaster on the screen.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_(2024_film)#/media/File:Trap_2024_(film_poster).jpg
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