I Just Saw

I just saw Trap and it were crap. (More like Claptrap, amirite?! My humblest apologies.) Of course it was, though, it’s by M Night Shyamalan. He’s only made crap for the last… what? 20 years? Apparently Split (2016) is worth a watch, but I’ve no desire to see another movie about M Night not understanding and somehow getting away with grossly mischaracterising mental illness and those who suffer from it as ticking time bombs.

Of course, you could fill a stadium with things that M Night doesn’t understand, which brings us neatly to Trap, which is about a father (Josh Hartnett) who takes his teenage daughter to see a concert by Lady Raven. She’s played by Saleka, a real R&B singer and M Night’s daughter. I wonder how she got the role?! It certainly wasn’t via a rigorous audition process, since her “acting” is so disconnected and flat that she seems like a space alien at times.

Hartnett’s character’s secret is that he’s really a serial killer nicknamed “the Butcher”, a name that I would have given my story’s antagonist when I was twelve. Shockingly original imagination, that M Night. I can see where he got the idea that his films are too good for America, when he responded to a question about their poor box office with the absurd coping strategy that they just have “European pacing”. Okay. And I have an arse like Nicki Minaj’s.

“The Big Bad Man No Really You Guys” realises that, dun dun dun, the concert is a trap! And a profiler played by Hayley Mills is coming for… wait. Hayley Mills. As in, from The Parent Trap (1961)? Why on earth is beloved 78-year-old British character actress Hayley Mills playing a hard-nosed FBI profiler who brings down serial killers and leads SWAT teams?

It can’t be… noooo… it’s surely not the case that M Night Hitchcock, “I like to play the audience like a broken kazoo” Shyamalan woefully miscast a crucial role in his film because he thought that casting the star of The Parent Trap in a film called Trap was funny? WHY AREN’T WE CATAPULTING OSCARS THROUGH THIS MAN’S WINDOWS ON THE DAILY?! THAT’S SO FUNNY, M NIGHT, THAT’S SO CLEVER! I’M SO GLAD THAT YOU GET TO MAKE HIGH PROFILE ENTERTAINMENT WHILE TALENTED OUTSIDERS CAN’T GET A FOOT IN THE DOOR!

To be serious for a moment, Trap is a stupid and tension-free film which is of a type where every character or plot decision is moronic, so it’s hard to even summarise why it doesn’t work. To pick one as an emblem for the whole, then, the reason why the Butcher knows that a seventy-something Disney star is on his tail is that a stadium employee tells him literally everything about the trap that police have created, including the code word he’s been told to on no account share with anyone.

He then takes him to a staff only area so that the Butcher can steal his security pass. Why does he trust this random stranger? Because the employee was selling t-shirts and the man gave up one that his daughter wanted so that a pushy girl could have it, which the employee takes as a sign that the guy is a good man of great morals. I’m giving myself a migraine explaining this.

The writing is honestly on the level of a Tommy Wiseau/Neil Breen/Ed Wood film at times. It’s well known now that M Night cannot grasp how people talk, or possibly just doesn’t care and feels as though his awkward laboured dialogue is “better” than how real people talk.

The slop seeps into the structure as well. It may be that M Night realised too late in the process how bad an idea it was to cast 78-year-old Hayley Mills in the Jodie Foster role, so shuffled her to the background while cycling through other women to play against Hartnett, from the character’s daughter to Lady Raven to his wife.

The only semi-interesting thing about the film is how little M Night seems to care about characterising either the Butcher or anyone, really. The Butcher has no convincing pathology. Serial killers generally target one particular gender, since their psychopathy tends to be sexual to some degree. The Butcher has a young Asian man chained in a basement, whom he spies on through his smartphone. So is he queer? Don’t be daft. That would be interesting. Is the guy a hostage whom he trapped because he found out what Hartnett had done to his girlfriend, the Butcher being more a Ted Bundy type? I JUST TOLD YOU TO NOT BE DAFT. THAT WOULD BE INTERESTING.

Because he’s ignorant and seems to hate the mentally unwell for some reason, the only motivation that M Night alludes to is based on some vague pulpy tropes about a domineering mother and OCD. Thanks, M Night. You’re so brave, using actual medical conditions to villainise characters in the trash that you make.

I think what he was going for with this is a movie like Seven (1995) and Saw (2004), where the plot is absolutely dominant while things like motivation and character are in service of it. The characters in those films are essentially puppets in a mechanical artifice, and the joy is in watching the highly intricate machine jerk them about. The problem with that is that M Night can’t be bothered to properly construct that machine, so all that we’re left with is his terrible dialogue and plotting.

Rating: 1/4