Yes, pop music can influence your life in a dramatic way. This is how the plot of M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller “Trap” can be richly summarized, a film that seems to depart from the Night Brand and looks more normal than most of his twisty films, too rudimentary for what he does and one or two rounds away from fully growing its best ideas and its visual language. Night delights in his movies. ‘The Sixth Sense’, ‘Old’ (a film I have gradually developed warm thoughts on), ‘The Village’ etc. all feature well cemented and controlled teams that project his best ideas. “Trap” on the other hand, is too often a missed opportunity for effective filmmaking in order to allow a sense of electricity and tension to be felt. If he had not erred so much, Josh Hartnett would be among the surprises of “Trap” who would make the film worth watching, his character is such fun to watch. It is frustrating that while he does such good work, it appears to be constrained by a picture that is unsure of how to utilize it.
We witness much of “Trap,” with its complex soundscape and witty textures, from a vantage point that will be quite frightful for any parent shelling out their hard earned cash for a concert of a pop star. In our case, it is Lady Raven, brought to life by Salena Shyamalan, whose mother was the director of the film, and who resembles somebody like Taylor Swift in terms of her pop success one of those shows where the median age of the audience is in the early teens and there’s hardly a single person who doesn’t know at least most of the lyrics. Salena was the writer and performer of a big part of the music and frankly, it is in excess here, partly due to the fact that it is not particularly infectious in the first place, unlike what T. Swift offers.
Accompanying this lady raven concert in Philly is a man called cooper (Hartnett), who is just like any other Amerika and his teenage daughter riley (ariel Donoghue). Not long after arriving, and without advancing the character’s arc, cooper sees that there are so many police officers at the venue that there are armed men at every single door. In a few moments, he shifts his expectations to more realistic, as due to a simple courtesy he gains the confidence of a sales rep (Jonathan Langdon) who offers him a tip the cops and feds are around because they have information that a serial killer known as The Butcher is holed up in the vicinity. That man is Cooper.
The running gags of preventing every male from leaving the building and dragging him in front of ace profiler Grant (gorgeous Hayley Mills quite definitely miscast, here only because she also starred in some other ‘Trap’ film and Night must have thought that was funny) to decide who is guilty, make no sense at all. Then again, people pay to see a movie about things like they see in “Trap”, and Shyamalan’s movie manages to get away with it for quite some time, mainly due to the fact that it lets Hartnett put it forward in the first act. Hartnett utilizes several clever, understated choices that articulate the particulars of Cooper’s character, as in the instance of an amused grin which shows the pleasure this sociopath takes in the element of surprise.
Regrettably, Hartnett is not extended the courtesy of having a sizeable role as scripted by Shyamalan. There is an attempt to portray Cooper as a cunning genius who has been elusive for everyone in his life, and must be so for a little longer until he evades capture again. Shyamalan almost bizarrely tries to draw Cooper, not as the smartest man in the room, but as the luckiest man. Cooper keeps escaping chance of being exposed through what can only be described as sheer movie hand waving. And when the orchestrator of the directive is forced to take his ideas out of the arena, it falls apart through these worse than terrible sequences that get less and less compelling. More often than not the response to the question “Why would someone behave like that in that particular context?” is simply “For the sake of the movie”.
When people go to a concert for a big pop star, there is an excitement unlike any other, people scream (usually in joy), it’s quite bright and someone in the audience probably stands out for some reason. It’s an interesting concept to hang a tension from, and where much of ‘Trap’ takes place, however Shyamalan does enough with the geography of the area to make it feel realistic.
A great film illustrates very well how even a terrible feeling arena can be huge and claustrophobic thanks to other thousands of people who surround you. But in a strange twist, the absolutely amazing Samburu Maderno’s cinematography on “Challengers” focuses on the giant billboard screens above the stage rather than the performer in front of it. This particular view is definitely to keep us enthralled in Cooper’s POV more but the actual Lady Raven performance appears quite unexciting especially when most of it is expected to be watched on a screen on a screen. Noemi Katharina Presswork’s (who also edited Night’s “A Knock at the Cabin”) editing skills are not best described as non existent either as they completely lacked that spark Trap required to engage with the people.
In the end all this brings out the question does it really need to be said that there still exists people in this dimension who manage to convince studios to back projects like Trap. It is a strange movie with unpredictable plots not based on any IP which is pretty rare in this era as there are too few original ideas in Hollywood blockbusters. Maybe just for that and for the fact there is a Johansson that is only starting with Oppenheimer and now with the war thriller it is hard to not allow Trap to be given the benefit of many doubts. But it is such a pity that it does not suck enough to be the one to be described by a term people love throwing at pop music offerings: so say Britney about Milkshake, disposable.
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