Hartnett’s odd double act fails to spring Trap

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This article was published 10/08/2024 (451 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Trap, the latest thriller from twist-ending-obsessed filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan, starts with 40-something father Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett) taking his 13-year-old daughter, Riley (Ariel Donaghue), to a pop concert in downtown Philadelphia.

Even considering the big crowd and the off-the-charts superstardom of featured performer Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan), there seems to be a lot of law enforcement milling around, a lot of urgent walkie-talkie action.

It turns out the Lady Raven concert is doubling as a massive sting operation to catch “The Butcher,” a serial killer who has murdered a dozen people.

It also turns out that when Cooper isn’t doing deliberately dorky dad stuff, his hobby — and every suburban father needs a pastime — is killing people and chopping them into little bits. Think Ward Cleaver with an actual cleaver.

To be clear, this revelation comes very early in the movie. It is not the patented M. Night Shyamalan twist. (Several of those come later.) No, the real surprise here is that in presenting a character who is deeply divided between doting dad and sadistic serial killer, the movie kind of comes down on the side of the serial killer.

As with so many of Shyamalan’s recent projects, Trap involves a goofy premise executed with even goofier logistics. But the setup, which critics have dubbed “Psycho at a Taylor Swift concert,” and “the most sinister dad joke ever,” has a certain camp-classic appeal. As several commentators point out, it’s maybe best to view Trap as a comedy.

But does the central joke work? Is normality so hard that serial-killing can be positioned as a sympathetic alternative? Is being part of a middle-class family, holding down a regular-guy job, fixing your kid’s bike really so unbearable?

Hartnett’s persona and performance go some way to pulling off Cooper’s weird double act. A onetime teen heartthrob who disappeared for a while and has lately returned in some smaller, darker roles (including a recent Black Mirror episode), Hartnett uses his Minnesota-nice vibe to good effect here. We often see Cooper juxtaposing a big, eager Midwestern smile with eyes that stay disconcertingly dead.

Shyamalan’s script talks up Cooper’s dad credentials. Riley is going through a tough time at school, and this father-daughter outing is meant to cheer her up. And Cooper does what good dads of teenagers do, which is to play up his lameness so his child can feel cool. He really leans into the doofus dad act — just watch his awkward dancing or his cringe attempts at mastering teen slang (“That’s so crispy”).

He also tries a few variations of “Silly me, I forgot my credit card at the T-shirt stand,” passing this off as a head-slapping bit of middle-aged absentmindedness, just another example of the dad-ish incompetence we see all the time in pop culture. In fact, this is a cover for Cooper to head into the concert venue’s backrooms and tunnels, where he engages in calculated, coldblooded attempts to get past the police cordon.

Eventually, Cooper’s repeated absences from the concert lead Riley to say, “Dad, why are you acting so weird?” But this, of course, is something 13-year-old daughters ask their fathers all the time, even when their pop-pops aren’t multiple murderers.

This slightly jokey tone works within the confines of the concert arena, as Cooper cycles between dear old dad and unmasked psychopath. At this point, the story is structured to get us onside. We’re in this trap with Cooper, and we encounter dangers and difficulties through his point of view. We’re given inside info on his ingenious strategizing, and sheer proximity bias means we root for him to escape.

When Cooper has contact with other people, Shyamalan engineers it so they’re irritating and gabby, even a bit rude. Again, this gets us on his side. Cooper is not irritating and gabby. On the other hand, he has, uh, butchered 12 people.

And while Shyamalan seems to be going for a full-on comic embrace of that pop-culture trend of making us feel sympathy for the devil, this feeling gets much harder to muster in the last third of the movie. Once the action opens out, we notice the absence of any kind of satirical framework, the lack of any kind of social or psychological insights that could prop up this “nice-guy serial-killer” trope.

Instead, Shyamalan gets busy — as he often does — with increasingly elaborate and ultimately tedious plot mechanics, and even Hartnett, who makes eating pie seem sinister, can’t save him. The story’s early feeling of preposterous fun is squandered in a series of false finishes, as the director keeps chasing that Sixth Sense surprise-ending high.

Whatever happens to Cooper, serial killer and Girl Dad extraordinaire, Shyamalan is once again caught in a trap of his own making.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca