MOVIE REVIEW
You can totally catch a mass murderer at an 'Eras Tour'-like concert, M. Night Shyamalan is the world's greatest dad, and a few other takeaways from instantly camp classic
By now, you’ve likely heard that Trap, the latest movie from M. Night Shyamalan that opened this weekend, revolves around two central plot points: A super-dorky dad played by Josh Hartnett has taken his teen daughter to see her favorite singer at a concert that doubles as a trap (see title) for a serial killer terrorizing Philadelphia; and this father-of-the-year contender is, in fact, the killer. Both of these elements are revealed in the trailer that dropped this past April, so we’re not exactly spoiling anything major… yet. You also assume that Shyamalan, a filmmaker who never met a twist he couldn’t turn into a high-concept 90 minute feature, has several other surprises in store if he’s giving those big reveals away from the get-go, and we can confirm there is something unexpected lurking around every narrative corner. Many of these quick left turns involve laughter which may or may not be intentional.
Trap is… well, you wouldn’t say it’s good. The singer, played by M. Night’s daughter Saleka Shyamalan, evokes some heavy Charli XCX vibes, among a host of other pop stars, but Trap is most assuredly not brat. (We’re going by XCX’s own definition of the term here.) It is undeniably camp, however, and we look forward to attending one of those midnight reclamation-revival screenings à la Showgirls, where everyone screams the dialogue and dresses like Hartnett’s normcore Norman Bates, a decade from now.
It’s also chock full of takeaways for aspiring filmmakers, true-crime podcast hosts and future mass murderers, assuming they can momentarily stop howling at what’s happening onscreen to catch them. So in the spirit of public service — and keeping in mind a sh*t-ton of spoilers await you if you keep reading — we present a few things we learned from watching Shyamalan’s attempt to craft a Seven for the Eras era.
You don’t need to give a serial killer a catchy name.
The Silence of the Lambs had Buffalo Bill, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre had Leatherface, real life gave us the Zodiac Killer and the Night Stalker and Jack the Ripper. Trap‘s resident psychopath is dubbed “The Butcher,” and while it is technically accurate — the 12 victims this Public Enemy No. 1 has left behind seem to have been sliced and diced in a way that suggests he’s familiar with a cleaver — it isn’t exactly the most media-friendly or memorable moniker. Judges would have accepted “The Philly Cheese Staker,” or “The Cutter of Brotherly Love,” or “Gritty.” It’s admittedly better than John Doe, but still.Editor’s picks
You do need to give a pop star and her huge fanbase a super-catchy handle, however.
The singer-slash-object-of-intense-devotion that Hartnett’s character Cooper, and his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue), have tickets to see at this early afternoon arena show — a curious if rather plot-convenient starting time for a big tour’s stop in Philadelphia, but never mind that — is named Lady Raven. If you think that the video screens behind Lady Raven will show a flock of ravens flying in formation, while she plays the piano (not flower-encrusted, for the record) during a T-Swift surprise-song-set part of the show, you’re 100-percent correct. If you think that the name of Raven’s fanbase, “The Flock,” will get more than a cursory mention until a major third-act turn, well… better luck next time.
If you ever need information about a super-secret stakeout, just ask a merch vendor.
Even if you go into Trap cold, it quickly becomes apparent that Cooper isn’t just a really sweet dad, gamely tolerating his daughter’s taste in pop tunes. He seems awfully suspicious of the number of police in attendance, and keeps acting squirrelly whenever he and Riley leave their seats. The SWAT teams swarming outside the venue give him pause as well.
So when he makes Riley give up the last t-shirt to another fan, the guy working the merch table compliments him on being so cool and promises to set aside a shirt for Riley when they get more. His first name is Jamie. We assume his surname is Exposition, since he then completely fills Cooper in on what’s happening, why the cops are there, how the whole thing is kind of a set-up. Later, Jamie totally lets this random stranger accompany him into an employees-only storage room and tells him the secret password regarding this law-enforcement operation, all while getting his badge swiped. You would think that butchers would be the first group to sue the makers of Trap for defamation, but our money is on merch vendors taking folks to court. They’re portrayed as gullible blabbermouths who spill everything the minute anyone shows public kindness. (In M. Night’s defense, there’s a nice mid-credits payoff to all of this.)Related
You can easily turn a concert by a major pop star into an elaborate serial-killer sting operation. Totally no big deal.
Apparently, the FBI and Philly’s finest have discovered that “The Butcher” will be in attendance at Lady Raven’s show, so they transform a concert with 30,000 attendees (the actual crowd in the venue appears to be way, way smaller, but we’re bad at math so maybe that’s accurate?) into a highly coordinated sting operation. We’d say it’s a classified operation as well, but, you know, chatty merch vendors, etc. You do eventually find out how the Feds and the fuzz find out about Cooper/Butcher being there, which is one of the more ludicrous plot twists in a film filled with them. Is it as ludicrous as the plan to catch the Butcher involving stopping every single male attendee at the show and questioning them, since the authorities have six different descriptions for the killer? We’ll let you be the judge of that.
Make sure your serial-killer profiler delivers all major updates via walkie-talkies.
The gray-haired profiler hired for this gig is the Butcher’s bête noire, and we’re consistently told that she’s the best of the best, she’s thought of every move, there’s no way out for this fiend with her on the case, yadda yadda yadda. She also has a penchant for laying out every new wrinkle and strategy of the operation by spelling everything out, in great detail, over the walkie-talkie channel to all personel. Apparently, the one move she did not think of of was the scenario where Cooper has swiped one of these devices and is thus always one step ahead of them. Note: The profiler is played by the mighty Hayley Mills of The Parent Trap fame, and if this movie gets even one viewer to go down a Mills rabbit hole and discover the unsettling 1961 thriller Whistle Down the Wind, it will have all been worth it.
It’s remarkably simple to talk to a huge pop star alone while backstage at her show.
Look, it helps if you lied to the singer’s manager to get your kid to dance onstage with Lady Raven, then helped out a kid with low blood sugar. But all you have to do in order to get a chart-topping musical icon, whose show has 18 times more security than usual, while she’s in a post-show area brimming with managers and bodyguards and entourage members and other pop stars, is say, “Hey, can I talk to you alone for a second?” Boom! Your wish is granted. To be fair, you have to ask politely. And then you have to show her the guy locked in your basem*nt via a phone app and demand she drive you and your kid out in her limo.
Livestreams save lives.
We won’t go into how Lady Raven ends up locked in the bathroom at Cooper and Riley’s house, while dad loses his sh*t and pounds on the door. We can say that Raven does what any smart pop star would do, which is go on social media and enlist the Flock in helping her find the aforementioned hostage-in-basem*nt. We’re sure that both the BeyHive and Swifties would have located the dungeon a little quicker, but still, kudos to the Flock.
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Any/all climactic confessions must be delivered shirtless.
Without spoiling all of Trap‘s jaw-droppingly ridiculous third act, we will say Cooper will eventually do his version of the Norman Bates monologue at the end of Psycho in front of a loved one, and he will conspicuously take off his shirt to do it. We assume that he’s partially disrobed so as not to get blood on his button-up. We also immediately wonder how the 46-year-old actor has maintained such a first-rate dadbod and if his personal trainer is taking on new clients.
Half-clothed or not, Josh Hartnett is a great actor.
Remember back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Hartnett was being primed to be the next big leading man? And then how his career never quite took off the way his handlers and Hollywood had planned, and he settled into being more of a offbeat character actor that seemed to add interesting angles to even the smallest parts? If Oppenheimer gave him the kind of smaller, but still key supporting role that suggested a potential Hartnettsaissance on the horizon, Trap fully coronates his “indie-weirdo” comeback phase. He’s the best part of the movie by a long shot, fully committing to letting his inner cleaver-wielding deviant continually peek through his Ward Cleaver act. And when M. Night makes him do the whole multiple-personality pathology thing — a well the filmmaker has gone to before, with better results — Hartnett lets you see this monster disintegrate before your eyes. We hope this nabs him a dozen more jobs. (We should also note that not everybody equal in terms of acting talent in this ensemble, and we’ll just leave this notion as a blind item.)
M. Night Shyamalan is an even better dad.
Say what you will about the Sixth Sense filmmaker, who’s had more professional/quality-control ups and downs than the Coney Island Cyclone: The man will do anything for his kids. He produced his daughter Ishana Shyamalan’s directorial debut The Watchers, and he’s essentially designed Trap to be a big showcase for his other daughter Saleeka. She’s a real-life musician who dropped an album last year, and wrote the songs she performs as Lady Raven. And when you view this misbegotten thriller as a means of exposure for a budding pop star rather than, say, a film in which your disbelief is suspended and your nerves are adequately shredded instead of leaving your funny bone bruised, you can call it a complete success. We have no idea how the public will take to Trap over the long run, Mr. Shyamalan. But we’re pretty sure there’s a World’s Best Dad mug in your near future, sir.
