Josh Hartnett plays a loving father who also happens to be a serial killer in the half-baked, wildly implausible thriller.
In “Trap,” Josh Hartnett plays a serial killer who ends up in the FBI’s crosshairs when he takes his daughter to a pop concert. The M. Night Shyamalan resurgence — if that’s the right word for the writer-director’s recent string of bankable but creatively spotty films — has followed a consistent enough formula: Pull off a well-worn genre exercise, weave in some half-baked psychodrama and hope the audience doesn’t overthink it.
Shyamalan fares better while meticulously laying out Cooper’s escape route from the titular trap. As a loose-lipped merch hawker reveals to Cooper, the FBI has intel that the so-called Butcher is attending the concert and has enough of a description to pick him out of the mostly female crowd. But even as Cooper scrambles to slip away and Shyamalan works overtime to drench the proceedings in dread, “Trap” is surprisingly devoid of tension whenever there isn’t a sharp object on-screen.
Lady Raven, whose pivot from plot device to temporary protagonist is surprisingly satisfying. And the final act confirms there was a reason the ever-dependable Alison Pill was cast in the seemingly peripheral role of Cooper’s wife.Shyamalan mercifully resists peppering his dialogue with inhuman lyricism, as he is wont to do, though Hayley Mills is saddled with a clunker or two while playing the FBI profiler running the operation.
When considering the Shyamalan oeuvre, this concert-set film ultimately plays like a filler track — not a certifiable banger like “The Sixth Sense” or “Unbreakable,” but not exactly a clunker in the vein of “The Happening” or “Lady in the Water,” either. If you sit back and enjoy its mindless rhythms, you might have a good time. Just don’t try mining the lyrics for meaning.The 23 best things to do in D.C.
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