Trap movie review: Shyamalan the writer lets down Shyamalan the director, again

You would imagine that if a crowded, hyper-excited arena is the FBI’s best shot at getting a serial killer, who has left at least 12 people butchered without leaving many clues, they would pay more attention to the CCTV screens trained to catch precisely such discrepancies.

Put that aside.

For, despite all the incongruity of the situation, this part of Trap, M Night Shyamalan’s latest writer-director venture, is its best. Courtesy Hartnett’s remarkable performance, suggesting barely contained menace through every twitch of his face muscle, alternating that with being this loving dad who knows all about his daughter’s girl troubles at school and who entertains her every indulgence, we are set up to expect the unexpected every second.

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What has brought the two to the arena is a concert by a Taylor Swiftish sensation called Lady Raven (Saleka). Shyamalan’s other daughter (not the one behind the too-recent The Watchers), Saleka is a singer apart from getting to do other things courtesy her surname. And, to her credit, her performance as a sellout singer, crooning songs she wrote herself, is great. The pyrotechnics of such a concert, the magnetism of the stage, the hysteria of girl fans, the buzzing business around it all, is well captured. So much so that it is a letdown sometimes as the camera swings around to Cooper and his mind at work to escape this trap set out for him, designed by a fabled FBI “profiler” (the most striking thing about her is her grey hair, which holds a special meaning for Cooper).

In many ways, Trap is quite different from a Shyamalan – and many a serial killer – film, in revealing right at the beginning that Cooper is the man everyone is looking for. Right at this moment, he has a man he is priming for killing in some basement, whom he tracks on his mobile phone.

That is a good thing in the case of Shyamalan, whose films have lately seemed like a bag of unwieldy, overstuffed tricks.

However, then comes the second half, and from the impressively taut setting of the concert arena, the film goes here, there and everywhere. A lot of that everywhere features Saleka, for no good reason at all and exposing her acting inadequacies. We never get to know the real Cooper in any serious sense, which would be interesting given his successful double life, and yet the film drags and drags.

Shyamalan the writer lets down Shyamalan the director again.

Trap movie director: M Night Shyamalan
Trap movie cast: Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Alison Pill
Trap movie rating: 2.5 stars