Trap review - how not to find a serial killer in a haystack

Don’t think too hard about the narrative absurdity of Trap, the new movie wriitten and directed by M Night Shyamalan. There’s a serial killer called The Butcher on the loose in Philadelphia and though the FBI doesn’t know their quarry’s name or what he looks like, they muster what looks like hundreds of agents, SWAT teams, and private security to bring him in.

If the mystery man is just one guy among thousands of fans at a pop concert, well, so what? Arrest ‘em all and let the FBI profiler (Hayley Mills) sort ‘em out. It’s not giving much away to reveal that Trap’s deadly mystery man doubles as the film’s hero, Cooper (Josh Hartnett). When Cooper – suburban firefighter by day, slaughtering fiend by night – squires his daughter Riley (Ariel Donaghue) to her first pop concert, he realises too late what he’s walked into. As young Riley shrieks with distracted delight, Cooper’s eyes dart around the arena, clocking heavy police presence and the unsettling sight of numerous men his age being hauled away by security.

Just why the FBI would stage this un-stealthy manhunt under bright lights amid thousands of possible hostages is a question that never gets answered. Better not to ask. Plenty of Hitchcock thriller plots are utterly preposterous. Shyamalan isn’t the virtuoso filmmaker that his idol Hitchcock was, or that Brian De Palma is (check out De Palma’s delirious Snake Eyes, with Nicolas Cage hunting a would-be assassin during an Atlantic City boxing match). But Shyamalan’s in good form, often saluting the Master of Suspense and his own previous work.

Superior movies of this kind sweep us along at a breakneck pace, seemingly pell mell, toward disaster. Shyamalan exercises hard-handed control over everything without the virtuoso touches of his betters. He’s an effortful auteur, and the pleasant Trap springs some shivery fun on its own audience.

The movie’s at its best when it follows Cooper’s eyeline as he furtively scans the arena for possible escape routes, improvising and lying his way through one close call after another. Cooper gets his first break when a talkative T-shirt seller (Jonathan Langdon) blabs about the reason behind the heavy security presence. Sneaking into an employee break room, Cooper eavesdrops on a SWAT briefing, then chats them up when they break for coffee. “Here, use my stash,” he says brightly, when one cop can’t find the cream and sugar.

Later, Cooper spies a tipsy teenager standing at the top of a staircase and twists the situation to his advantage with a well-timed shove. As the girl’s phony rescuer, Cooper dodges his pursuers by carrying her to a first aid room.

Then he realises that his only escape route is backstage, so he contrives a plan to get his super-fan daughter a moment face-to-face with her idol (Saleka Night Shyamalan, the filmmaker’s daughter, pictured above, who does a credible job playing the pop star). The movie’s sound team, led by Luke Gentry, creates understated aural magic, weaving the arena-pop songs and cheers with subjective sound design that allows us – and the characters – to hear what’s going on during key moments.

Josh Hartnett, whose breakout role came in Black Hawk Down (2001), exudes so much easy, low-key charm that he makes Cooper’s nice-guy persona believable. Watch his eyes, though, when Cooper’s recognised by a neighbour, the mean-girl mother (Marnie McPhail-Diamond) of young Riley’s school bully. His pupils darken like those of a shark sensing blood. You wouldn’t want to be alone with this predator, but the prospect of a facedown between a nasty helicopter parent and a killer in disguise is too good to miss.

When Trap moves away from the its concert-arena setting, though, the movie’s singular setup is gone, and Cooper, like the impossible-to-kill Michael Myers of Halloween fame, eludes capture too many times. For a while, Hartnett’s beguiling portrait of monster sustains Trap, but then its silliness becomes overwhelming.

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