2024: The Best of the Worst: M. Night Shyamalan's Trap Is Iconically Idiotic

The crazy twist of Trap is that it sucks but is still enormous fun.

When I wrote for The A.V. Club back in the day, I was amazed and horrified by how personally some commenters took reviews. If a critic praised something that they abhorred or abhorred something they deemed worthy of praise, it was often seen as a direct attack on them, their intelligence, and, for good measure, their mamas as well rather than merely an expression of someone’s opinion.

I was particularly aghast at how deeply invested readers were in my Saturday Night Live reviews. Everything was black and white. Either a sketch was incontrovertibly hilarious and only a dim-witted, comedy-hating mouth-breather would feel otherwise, or it was so obviously abysmal that you’d have to be a real maroon to differ.

It ultimately did not matter! I’ve just barely eked out a living expressing opinions on the internet and in books, yet I find few things less inherently valuable than opinions. My opinion, in particular, does not matter, in part because opinions are fluid and ever-changing. I might hate a movie I loved twenty years ago or love a movie I once despised. In that sense, reviews are less definitive judgments than records of what one person felt at a particular moment in time.

I know all this, yet when I saw that M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap had a relatively robust Metascore of 61, I was nevertheless blown away. I know that opinions are subjective, but that did not keep me from thinking strongly that Trap is objectively not just a bad movie but a sustained insult to our collective intelligence.

Incidentally, when I wrote this article that was true. Its score has fallen to 52 since then, which is still generous but makes more sense.

Everyone who likes Trap is wrong and also possibly insane, is all that I’m saying. Every element of Trap deserves to be singled out for scorn and mockery: the plot, dialogue, characters, world-building, performances, nepotism, writing, directing, and cinematography.

M. Night Shyamalan, who can be a very gifted filmmaker, sometimes suffers from selective amnesia. The frightmaster with the famously twisted imagination and imaginative twists, temporarily forgets how human beings think, act, and behave. He then writes a screenplay reflecting this poignant lack of understanding and directs in a way that suggests that the prolific filmmaker has not interacted with another human being in decades.

An unpersuasive 105-minute commercial for M. Night’s daughter’s forgettable pop music masquerading as a gimmicky psychological thriller, Trap, casts Josh Hartnett as Cooper Adams. He’s a firefighter with a double life.

Cooper cultivates an image as the Boy Next Door. He’s got the perfect wife, the perfect family, and a heroic career with the fire department. He’s also a prolific serial killer known and feared as “The Butcher” for reasons you can probably figure out.

As a reward for good grades, Cooper takes his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert by Lady Raven, a massive superstar with a Taylor Swift/Beyonce-level following.

Lady Raven has lots of fans who are obsessed with her. Who did Shyamalan cast as a wildly charismatic superstar so explosively talented and popular that she can fill a 30,000-seat stadium in the afternoon, then sell out again that evening? Why, the writer-director cast his daughter Saleka, of course.

Saleka is a lovely woman with a passable voice, but she’s nowhere as charismatic or magnetic as the film needs her to be.

Ah, but Trap isn’t just a vehicle for the song stylings of M. Night Shyamalan’s eldest daughter. It also showcases her songwriting, musicianship, and acting. In a third act that gets more insulting by the minute, she becomes a lead actress as well.

Lady Raven is super duper mega-famous. Her life is worth thousands of the lives of her fans. So it feels adorably naive and idealistic that much of the third act turns on Lady Raven moving heaven and earth so that she can possibly save ONE random dude. One dude! And the dude is just some guy. He’s not famous and important like Mr. Beast or Jimmy Carter.

It’s nice that the filmmaker likes his daughters so much but Trap would be better with someone outside of the writer-director’s immediate family in the crucial role.

The cliche about serial killers is that they seem completely normal and seemingly wouldn’t hurt a fly. That is not true of Hartnett. Even in corny dad mode, Hartnett has the cold, dead eyes of a shark.

Cooper can’t pretend to be non-evil for more than a few minutes. Every smile, nod, or jovial bit of banter is a performance specifically designed to hide Cooper’s true nature as a sociopath driven to kill for the hackiest of reasons.

Shyamalan ineptly rips off Psycho with a subplot establishing that our villain grew up to be a murderous maniac because he has the exact same mother as poor Norman Bates. Psychology doesn’t get cheaper, easier, or more lazily Freudian. Stealing badly from Hitchcock doesn’t make you Hitchcockian; it makes you a thief.

Early in the show Cooper forces himself to make a minute or two worth of small talk with Jamie (Jonathan Langdon), an African-American man blown away to encounter a dad spending time with his daughter.

He’s so amazed by the sheer dedication of a parent who chooses to spend time with their offspring and, get this, buy a souvenir tee-shirt that he nominates Cooper dad of the year and gives him a free tee-shirt for being such an amazing white family man.

Jamie does more than that, however. Jamie understandably assumes that no one who has sired a child could possibly be a bad person. Along with other suspiciously relevant information, Jamie tells Cooper the real purpose of the show: trapping “The Butcher” inside the show and ensuring that he can’t get out.

This plot makes no sense initially, yet makes even less sense the more you think about it.

As a form of insurance, the mass murderer has a video link to a man he’s been torturing and will kill if anything happens to him. Hayley Mills of The Parent Trap stars as a brilliant profiler that Cooper tangles with. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a draft of the screenplay where Cooper and the Profiler play a literal game of chess that clumsily epitomizes the figurative game of chess at the core of the dynamic.

The star of the original The Parent Trap lays a trap to ensnare a parent. And she’s hilariously, improbably gung-ho, so even though she’s a distinguished professional expert in her late seventies, she not only takes a preposterously central role in the big takedown; she fucking nails the fucker herself or at least is part of the team that captures, temporarily at least, Hartnett’s bad guy.

About halfway through the film, M. Night Shyamalan has a cameo as Lady Raven’s uncle. To give the casting director credit, it is very easy to believe that the characters are related. That’s one of the overlooked joys of nepotism.

The writer-director’s cameo would take you out of the movie, except the film never pulls you in. There’s nothing to be taken out of. Trap is never convincing. It’s never tense. It’s a father’s indulgent act of devotion toward a beloved child more than it is an actual movie.

Trap doesn’t have a plot so much as it has an endless series of maddening plot holes duct-taped together and executed with equal parts chutzpah and shamelessness.

Despite ostensibly being professionals in a crisis, everyone Cooper encounters is so unbelievably stupid and gullible that he doesn’t need to be an evil genius to outsmart them; average intelligence should do the trick.

Hartnett comes off as a paranoid serial killer justifiably terrified that he will be found out at any moment. Yet everyone treats him like a Mr. Rogers-like apogee of All-American wholesomeness.

Being an attractive, confident white man gets Cooper everything he wants when he wants it. He lets other peons watch shows from a universe away. Cooper doesn’t just score primo seats for himself and his daughter. She dances onstage with her idol for an entire song after her dad tells a fib about her being sick.

That is not entirely implausible. I will always, for example, remember when I was a child, and I had a moonwalking competition with Michael Jackson after he pulled me from the audience and had me perform for a solid four or five minutes during the Thriller tour.

Shyamalan’s daughter is a musician and, if you’re being generous, an actress, but judging by the film, the writer-director has never actually been to a concert and knows them only through his daughter’s vague descriptions.

It would be easier to recommend Trap as an enjoyable but terrible B-movie if it had wrapped up its idiocy in 90 minutes instead of 105. Trap is sloppy, shapeless, and aimless.

Yet I have a certain blinkered affection for the movie. Shyamalan is an auteur in his worst movies as well as his best. Trap doesn’t have suspense, laughs, or plausible human behavior, but it has lots of that wonderful, wooden, awkward M. Night Shyamalan personality.

Trap is enjoyably trashy but runs out of energy in the third act. The same is true of Hartnett’s campy, scenery-chewing performance as a man who is like Ward Cleaver if he disemboweled victims with a cleaver.

This is a bona fide Shyamalan stinker along the lines of The Village, The Happening, and The Lady in the Water. That should be an inducement for some masochistic souls (like myself) and a warning to saner souls.

So, if you are looking for a terrible movie that is insultingly unrealistic, ineptly plotted, oddly amateurish, yet weirdly endearing, Trap is for you!

One and a half stars out of Five