Trap Is a Bad Dad Movie

One goes to an M. Night Shyamalan movie wanting to love it. Not because the writer-director, now in a curious fourth phase of his career, has given us much reason to hope in recent years, but because he works in an earnest mode that feels in short shrift nowadays. His films—steadfastly genre, elevator-pitch intriguing—tend to be expressions of pure sincerity. He believes in his work, and ardently wants us to follow him into his world.

But time and time again, those journeys have been rough ones—and perhaps never rougher than Shyamalan’s new film, Trap, which opened in theaters on Thursday. The premise is hooky: a lovable dad escorting his daughter to see her favorite pop idol is revealed to be a serial killer at the center of a massive police sting happening at that very concert arena. How fun, to stage a suspense movie at a Taylor Swift-ian event and dare us root for the bad guy. And what lovely casting! Josh Hartnett, long past his teen idol days but no worse for the wear, brings with him the comfort of familiarity but also an air of mystery—he’s been out of the spotlight long enough that we almost have to get to know him again.

Shyamalan has built a solid foundation, as he tends to do: clever setup, appealing lead actor, and an interesting (and quite relevant) cultural milieu. But fairly quickly, Trap’s sleek design peels away, and we see the shoddy engineering it’s been hiding. Trap never manages much tension as Hartnett’s character, Cooper, darts and lurks through the arena, desperately trying to evade capture. Dumb luck is too often mistaken for cunning—not that much cunning is needed when the police operation at the center of the film is so ridiculously constructed. The dialogue is stilted in a way terribly signature to Shyamalan, distractingly ponderous and awkward. Hartnett can’t quite get a handle on the character, yawing willy-nilly between manic approximation of an affable everydad and steely psychopath. There’s not enough shading, not enough of the more credible in-between.

That’s more a fault of the writer than the performer. Shyamalan can’t settle on a tone; he turns the comedy and tension and drama knobs seemingly at random. Trap is jumble of moods and textures that never cohere into the taut little thriller that the trailers advertise. The film is instead paunchy and meandering, a slog of pat psychology and limp cultural analysis.

At times, it seems Trap was made for only one purpose: to brighten the star of the person portraying pop idol Lady Raven, a sort of Gaga/Taylor/Olivia Rodrigo hybrid. She’s played by Saleka Shyamalan, a musician in her own right who is also the director’s daughter. We’ve run around and around in circles debating Hollywood nepotism these past few years, so that’s probably not worth getting into again. If Shyamalan believes in his daughter and wants to give her a showcase, that is his prerogative.

But as we saw long ago with Sofia Coppola’s infamous acting debut, a devoted dad’s vision might be a bit blurry. Shyamalan the younger is a strong singer, and the songs she wrote for the film are pleasant if a bit generic. Acting, though, is not yet a forte, and she is required to do a fair bit of that in Trap. Her scenes are leaden and unpersuasive—as is her father’s strange argument for the noble power of global celebrity. Shyamalan did an ostensibly nice thing for his kid, but how nice was it, really?

The more successful bit of casting is that of Hayley Mills, the star of the original Parent Trap who now plays an FBI profiler setting a trap for a parent (in a movie called Trap). It’s a cute joke, left to hang in the background as a kind of jumbo easter egg rather than being gestured toward with a look-what-I-did wink. Shyamalan has no time for that, ensnared as he and his film are in a different sort of pride altogether.