“This whole concert? It’s a trap.”

Justin’s rating: But it’s no Mouse Trap

Justin’s review: M. Night Shyamalan has been one of the most infuriating directors to follow, and it’s not even close. If he was pure Uwe Boll-levels of bad, that’d be one thing. If he was nothing but Steven Spielberg genius, it’d be another. But Shyamalan harbors equal measures of genius and awfulness, creating movies that are often great ideas with the most puzzling execution possible. You want to like him, you want to get another hit of that Sixth Sense originality, but often you’re left with whispering trees, glasses of water, fake monsters, and skeletons on a beach.

I’ll probably get around to more of his older stuff eventually — marathon maybe? — but for today I want to look at his newest flick starring everyone’s favorite sleepy tree sloth, Josh Harnett.

I really like the setup for this film, which is that our lead character Cooper (Harnett) is actually a serial killer known as The Butcher. Taking his daughter Riley to a pop concert (with Shyamalan’s own daughter as the pop star), Cooper discovers that the whole thing is an elaborate trap to identify and catch him. So can he get escape the tightening noose while taking care of his kid? What if his family finds out who he truly is? And — here’s the real twist, up front — should we actually root for him to succeed?

He is the bad guy, after all.

It’s easy to forget this, because Harnett plays Cooper as a pretty likable dude who clearly dotes on his daughter. And then he pulls out his phone to check on the webcam of his current captive victim, which makes it hard to reconcile the two faces.

However you feel about Cooper, he is observant and smart. When he realizes that he’s in the middle of a nightmare scenario — a teenie bop concert that could put him away for life — he’s got to use all of his wits to try to evade the police and FBI crawling all over the place.

No, don’t think about the sheer expense, danger, and difficulty it would entail to run this massive sting operation around a 20,000+ attendee concert. That would start to crack the premise and only lead to more holes, holes that are certainly there. This is meant to be enjoyed on a surface level and no deeper.

Simple, clever thrillers seem to play to Shyamalan’s strengths as a filmmaker, such as the deliciously tense tale of The Visit. This genre gives him room for those narrative zigs and zags while downplaying his biggest weaknesses, which is characterization and dialogue.

Josh Harnett does the best he can to inject some life into a character who’s a two-faced goon. Sometimes he even approaches something natural, which puts him above a lot of the other characters, who spit out awkward exposition the only way that Shyamalan characters do. This is very much a one-man show, and he acquits himself despite the worst haircut I’ve ever seen him sport.

There’s some excellent tension here during the concert itself as Cooper discovers that he’s got a profiler (Hayley Mills, moving on from parent trapping to killer trapping) tracking him down and predicting the very moves he was going to make. Since he is an amoral killer and all, he’s not above hurting others to gain an advantage, but having to babysit his daughter complicates things more than he’d like.

Trap is good fun but not without a lot of the expected Shyamalan jank: Putting himself in a “hey it’s the director!” role, making us listen to his daughter sing for way too long*, making us watch his daughter act badly for even longer, people vomiting exposition at the most convenient time, and escalating developments that are far more silly than believable. Topping that, the third act is a weird appendage, offering several false endings and some more of that clunky dialogue that tells more than it shows.

Oh, and the police are just idiots here. I wish I could detail to you every terrible decision and action they make in the last, say, 20 minutes, but it’s ridiculously unbelievable.

This movie reminded me why I tend to avoid extremely suspenseful thrillers, because Trap wound me up right before I was trying to go to bed. I get too anxious with films like this. Yet it’s still a good ride and a throwback to the ’90s heyday of serial killer obsession, even if it’s laughably dumb for about 55% of its runtime.

*Many people have made the observation that this feels like a cheap promotional effort to push Saleka Night Shyamalan’s music and acting career, and it’s hard to debate that.