Why M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Trap’ Fails So Hard
M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap is a movie with a simple premise that should have been easy to pull off. Apparently, it was too much for the Sixth Sense director to go a lousy 105 minutes without insulting the audience. While his directing is strained, one of the performances in Trap really sinks the film.
M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Trap’ doesn’t understand the appeal of movie killers
People love fictional serial killers, especially when they have a perverse charm. Whether it’s Hannibal Lecter, Patrick Bateman, or Count Dracula, the best movie killers make you believe they could draw people in before they sink their teeth in. After all, real killers like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer were able to do the same. Making a movie where the main character is a serial killer with no magnetism would be a terrible idea.
That’s exactly what Trap is. Josh Hartnett plays Cooper, a dorky, awkward dad who is taking his daughter to a concert by pop sensation Lady Raven. He makes unnatural small talk with his daughter that sounds like the sort of lines Quentin Tarantino might write while drunk. It turns out that Cooper is a serial killer known as The Butcher (how creative) and the concert is an attempt by the FBI to capture him.
The twist of ‘Trap’
Of course, none of this makes much sense. The FBI putting thousands of people in danger on the off-chance that they might find one criminal in a gigantic sea of people sounds like the sort of hare-brained scheme that would get someone fired. Of course, plenty of silly plotlines have worked with the right characters and dialog. Hartnett, on the other hand, displays none of the charisma that the character so desperately needs. How a repulsive weirdo like him keeps getting away with horrid crimes is a mystery the film never solves.
Ever since Shyamalan made so many ’90s kids scratch their heads over the ending of The Sixth Sense, his movies have become famous for their big twists. Trap has a big twist of its own, which makes sense. Shyamalan doesn’t pull the rug out of the story this time. However, the twist feels contrived, and Trap doesn’t regain the little momentum it had before the plot switches gears.
What M. Night Shyamalan was thinking
During a 2024 interview with /Film, Shyamalan discussed his work with Hartnett on Trap. “We talked a lot about how we could make the choices credible enough so that you believe that this guy, who seemingly loves his daughter [laughs] and will do anything for her, [and is] also the serial killer,” he said. “And not cheat the audience and be like, ‘Yeah, these two things exist.’ And for me, a lot of that stuff is a front, and then the front bleeds into his reality. Which is something that happens often, I think, with people who have really intense, forward-facing fronts and their reality of themselves is kind of hidden. Often they become that front.
“And with him, he’s sort of melted into that front so far that he started to have something that’s like love for his daughter,” he added. “But it’s probably not love the way that you and I understand it, it’s probably more just the way that she reflects onto him, his understanding of himself.”
It would be hard to find anything about Cooper believable, much less that he’s simultaneously a killer and a loving father.
