Jonny Numb

Is the trap of Trap the trap of the stadium pop concert All-American Family Guy Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is attending with his tween daughter (Ariel Donoghue)?

Or is the trap of Trap something else…something more insidious, perhaps?

And maybe the most important question: by the time the trap of Trap is revealed, will anyone care about the trap?

Lean in close, folks, because I’ve got a spoiler-not-spoiler for you:

The trap of Trap is: the whole damn movie is a trap!

That’s right: from your transaction at the box office to purchase a ticket…to whatever you decide on at the concession stand…to the seat you choose to sit in…to the previews…to the lights going down and the digital file unraveling on the screen…the mere decision to see Trap – and, moreover, to remain in the theater by the time the end credits roll – is the real trap.

A quarter-century ago, M. Night Shyamalan was an Oscar-nominated filmmaker. A quarter-century later, he’s mostly coasting off the good fortune and critical acclaim of arguably his greatest creation: The Sixth Sense. That 1999 effort was subtle in its cleverness, bringing a mournfully art-house approach to a mainstream ghost story. It was one of many noteworthy mainstream movies in an exceptional cinematic year.

Lately, Shyamalan has become the equivalent of his stop-motion counterpart on Robot Chicken, exclaiming, “what a twist!” at any number of increasingly absurd developments.

A fateful appointment with the dentist to get a filling led me to the theater to kill a few hours while the effects of the Novocain wore off.

And Trap – to the trailer’s credit – did have me intrigued. After all, it seemed long overdue for someone to cast the dead-eyed Hartnett as a serial killer who also happens to be a loving father (whatatwist!).

So I purposely fell into Trap, and have no one but myself to blame.

The problem is, the emotional core of Shyamalan’s films has long since flown the coop, replaced by a nagging self-consciousness that’s bent on (over-)explaining every plot development, aping Brian De Palma-style camera tricks, and – above all else – turning the story into an increasingly messy cat’s-cradle of escalating twists.

I say “twists” and not “tension,” because there’s next to none of the latter to be found in Trap. Even worse: as a suspense-thriller which should be hitting us with one noose-tightening moment after another, there is no sense of efficiency to Shyamalan’s script – the pace lumbers, struggling under the massive weight of its creator’s ego, as the film awkwardly transitions from one encounter to the next.

By the time this thing dragged itself into the third act, I wasn’t the only one in the theater feeling impatient and laughing at all the wrong places.

The result is a thriller without thrills, a horrific premise with little horror (though there is a cool and nasty gag involving a deep fryer), and a potentially intriguing character that Shyamalan has no real interest in exploring outside of pop-psychology “mommy” issues. Yawn. (Read Stephen King’s novella “A Good Marriage” for a more insightful take on similar material.)

The run time is 105 minutes, but it feels like 3 hours (and not the engrossing 3 hours of something like Oppenheimer).

And then there’s the awkward use of Jonathan Demme-style POV shots as actors pull Jim Carrey faces (or, in Hartnett’s case, overdone Jack Nicholson Joker-grins)…the use of barely functional dialog to push the plot along…a stunt-cast Hayley Mills (get it? She was in The Parent Trap!) coming off as the worst FBI profiler in the history of the profession…how the concert in question (in which Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka flexes her pipes) seems to go on for six hours (complete with no fewer than two intermissions?!)…and the fact that the whole “trap” of Trap seems like one of the dumbest, most inefficient ways to capture a serial killer ever conceived.

During the final act, Shyamalan attempts to pull his whatatwist maneuvers with an attempted recontextualizing of the screenwriting flubs and narrative clumsiness that came before. But it only adds insult to injury when you realize the metaphysically-minded Longlegs did the whole recontextualizing of a serial-killer narrative in a far better (and certainly more rewarding) way, leaving Shyamalan’s painfully earthbound and mechanical narrative lagging far behind the curve.

I mean…for as much as the mainstream critical establishment regards them as bottom-feeding torture porn, the honest truth is: most of the Saw sequels have a character base that keeps even the most logic-defying moments on a somewhat credible plane. There’s nothing remotely like that in Trap.

What we’re left with – outside of about a dozen false endings, each one more desperate than the last – is not a thriller, but a hollow shell of one. Where poor Josh Hartnett attempts to level-up his cinematic comeback (begun in last year’s Oppenheimer – damn!) but isn’t given the necessary character depth to come across as much more than the hunky dad of the neighborhood making funny faces at kids’ birthday parties. Even when it’s supposed to be, the threat simply isn’t there. What a freaking shame.

1 out of 5 stars