Trap (2024) To prevent anyone from dozing off during this post (including Yours Truly), we'll mercifully skip the usual yada-yada-yada about the ups and downs of writer-director M. Night Shyamalan's films.
Yeah, yeah, we all know the story....the thriller guy who went from Next-Spielberg to Cinema Laughingstock and back again......several times over.
Let's get right down to what you want to know about his new one.
BQ's verdict: It's a hoot and a half......and we loved it even when its third act goes flying off the rails with what plays out like a string of alternate endings strung together, one after the other. Sort of a Blu-Ray Special Feature that never ends, built into the movie itself.
A wondrous, brilliant set-up vaguely based on a true event......loving kind-hearted Firefighter dad Cooper (Josh Hartnett) has gifted his tween daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) with the treat of a lifetime - floor seats at a sold out arena concert of Taylor Swift-ian pop Megastar Lady Raven (the director's pop singer daughter Seleka Shyamalan).
Noticing the overwhelming massive police presence at the venue, Cooper gets the top secret news from a friendly, too chatty T Shirt vendor (Jonathon Langdon). The concert's been devised as a rat trap for "The Butcher", a terrifying serial abductor-torturer-killer.
And guess who 'The Butcher' is....(heh, heh, heh, heh.....)
We can't fault anything in the first hour of the film, taking place within the concert. It's a display of Shyamalan's best use of what Hitchcock dubbed 'pure cinema'......a dazzling, relentless swirl of suspense, perfectly edited together. And what an actor's dream showcase for Hartnett. We watch his 'sweet Dad' mask begin to come unglued as his desperation to escape the concert increases. (In some scenes, Shyamalan cleverly frames only half his face on the screen, hammering home the point he's really only half human)
Adding to the vast contingent of law enforcement come platoons of SWAT teams and FBI agents under the command of an elderly British profiler....played by, we kid you not, the immortal Baby Boomer cutie-pie Hayley Mills. Would anyone but Shyamalan ever think of casting her in this role? We doubt it, and we burst into a big smile seeing her on the big screen again.
Then, after all this delicious concert cat-and-mouse stuff, the story moves into the outside world. Lady Raven herself gets caught up in the proceedings, as well as Cooper's endearing wife Rachel (Alison Pill). And here's where the director, for better or worse, does all the stuff he's been raked across the coals and roundly mocked for.....as Cooper (and we, the audience) endure one wildly far-fetched reversal-of-fortune after another.
But ya know what? We didn't mind at all. Call us as crazy as Shyamalan, but we decided to sit back, gobble that popcorn, and take that wild ride all the way to the end.
True enough, M. Night's a storyteller-entertainer with a penchant for going way overboard......and more often than not, his ego-driven attempts to top himself leave him with a whole plate of eggs on his face.
Well, we say.....let Shyamalan be Shyamalan. Anyone who's that fearless in saying to an audience 'wait'll you get a load of this!" should not be discouraged. He wants you to cringe, to bite your nails and most of all, have fun with the tall tale he's spinning you by the campfire.
And damn it, we did. 4 stars (****).
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