Trap

By the time “Trap” ends, figuratively, if not in some sense literally, it is so far away from where it began, that you might have a hard time remembering how you got there. In fact, “Trap” doesn’t even end, not really, not so much setting up a sequel, though I suppose it could be, as merely dispense one more open-ended reversal; it could have just kept going, and going, and going, and probably is in some alternate universe. True, that means “Trap” eventually enters an Alice in Wonderland-like place where there are so many surprises that they cease to surprise but it remains entertaining, nevertheless, on the brazen level of seeing how long writer/director M. Night Shyamalan can keep the water, so to speak, magically suspended in the air. 

The story: dad Cooper Abbott (Josh Hartnett) takes his teenage daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to see pop star Lady Gaga, er, sorry, Lady Raven (Saluki Night Shyamalan) in concert. The twist: Cooper Abbott is a serial killer known as The Butcher and the entire concert is a trap to lure The Butcher into a place from which he cannot escape and nab him. Mind you, that is not me giving away the twist. All this information is essentially disclosed right up front, making the twist the engine of the story as Cooper then works to find a way out of the arena with cops and SWAT looming at every exit and without revealing his double identity to his Lady Raven disciple daughter. That sounds like enough to power an entire movie, and maybe it could have, but as it turns out, that’s not quite the half of it, as Shyamalan gleefully keeps restacking the deck.

As deft as it is diabolical, Harnett’s lead performance evinces a lame and loving dad and a not-quite-right-in-the-head serial killer in equal measure, sometimes at once, sometimes one at a time, showing you how he’s gotten away with it and how he’s starting to crack, at least a little. Even Shyamalan’s propensity for overbearing straight-on close-ups and stilted dialogue, are made to work in Hartnett’s off-kilter air, like he, himself, is the strange glitch in the matrix. Harnett’s air, then, comingling with Cooper’s behavior, the way he tethers his constantly evolving plan for escape with providing Riley the best night of her life, like improbably getting them whisked backstage, is a spot-on evocation of a sociopath if, ultimately, a shallow one given where the screenplay goes. I do not entirely mean that as a criticism. 

If Lady Raven initially suggests a background character, she becomes more prominent as the narrative develops, though in what ways I will not reveal. Suffice to say, that if Shyamalan had dropped the Lady Raven pretense and just cast Lady Gaga as Lady Gaga, I might watch “Trap” 50 times a year. As it stands, Saluki Night Shyamalan acquits herself well, maybe because as the director’s daughter she has an innate understanding of his strange rhythms of dialogue and of how to just exist in those close-ups.  The Cooper / Riley storyline, though, setting up as a warped version of a father giving his daughter the best night of her life, gradually recedes into the background as Shyamalan moves different characters and themes into the foreground. The pace of these switchbacks, however, does not leave much time to adequately explore them, and at a certain point, “Trap” proves more interested in its twists than its insights. But if it winds up less interesting as a consequence, it is no less involving, and if it does not have anything larger to say, so what. It’s an illusion that manages to last just as long as it needs to.