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Mostly silly and often cheekily outrageous, this goofy cat-and-mouse thriller starring Josh Hartnett as a serial killer is ridiculous fun
The fact that Trap is 100 per cent ridiculous – like, off-the-chain barking mad, from the moment the plot kicks in – doesn’t stop it being a funfair ride that’s worth a spin. Here we have a premise Hitchcock might have relished, and a script he might have snorted at, but still used, since he wasn’t afraid of milking hokum and throwing plausibility right out of the window.
M Night Shyamalan has shown similar propensities in virtually every film he has made. This loopy psychothriller is more easily indulged than most. We’re at a concert in Philadelphia for a pop star named Lady Raven, played – sorry, nepo baby-haters – by Shyamalan’s unmistakably talented daughter Saleka. Paternal pride is a bit of a theme: strapping dad Cooper (Josh Hartnett) has bagged tickets for a special afternoon show, to reward his teenage daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) for good grades.
It’s all a trap. For reasons the script hides away, which turn out to be insane, the FBI has reason to believe that a serial killer known as “The Butcher” is in attendance, and the entire venue is on lockdown. Cooper – this is no spoiler, for the trailer outed him – happens to have a petrified hostage locked in a basement nearby, and must suss out a means of escape.
There’s a joke built in here about teenage girls wanting to curl up and die at how embarrassing their parents are being: “Dad, you’re acting weird?” is almost every other line of dialogue for Riley, who is remarkably like her giddy namesake from Inside Out 2. She doesn’t know the half of it.
Hartnett, who deserves this comeback, doesn’t take his role too seriously, even when the script tries diagnosing him with massive, Norman-Bates-esque mommy issues. Cooper isn’t exactly scary – not with Longlegs still terrorising the multiplexes. He seems both rattled and amused by the net closing around him, which situates the film in the semi-parodic zone it most happily occupies.
As for how seriously Shyamalan himself is taking things, you may change your mind on that incessantly from scene to scene. Watch out for whiplash. The plot performs some seriously gonzo contortions to lock us in a suburban bathroom with Lady Raven herself, and make her the only person who can save the day… by going live on Instagram. (Hitchcock would never have thought of that.)
All this, and… Hayley Mills? In what has to count as one of the year’s wackier casting coups, she pops up as a plummy FBI psych-profiler. The whole film is a stunt, and a goof – sometimes simply too silly to get suspense ticking at all, but often cheekily outrageous. You may think it’s worth the trade-off, or you may think it’s using a brazen pile-up of improbabilities to avoid thinking straight. Either way, you’re extremely unlikely to be bored.
In cinemas now
English