Serial killers are a fortunate bunch.  While the job does require a commitment to planning, attention to detail and a level of perseverance that few can muster, it’s also heavily dependent upon luck.  Take The Butcher, the serial killer at the center of Trap, who somehow manages his homicidal enterprise in addition to being a devoted family man and a firefighter.  His dedication to all facets of his life is nothing short of admirable.  For starters, The Butcher’s daily schedule must be a logistical nightmare.  He must ping-pong between his home, putting out fires and attending to victims–residing at any one of his covert murder houses–without getting caught.  The Butcher may be good, but nobody’s that good.  Luck is always present to give serial killers a little helpful nudge when they’re so close to being caught.  In Trap, The Butcher is so darn lucky that he must be living the Life of Riley.

The movie positions Cooper (Josh Hartnett as The Butcher) as a BTK-type of serial killer; he’s a family man with OCD who hides his Hyde persona from his loved ones.  Trap never shows us what The Butcher actually does to his victims, choosing instead to allude to his crimes.  (We are told that he chopped someone up into pieces, but are never shown said pieces.)  What we do see plenty of is Cooper being a devoted father to his teen daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue).  How committed is he to the role?  He not only bought her tickets to the Lady Raven concert, but is attending it with her as well.  

It’s evident when Cooper and Riley drive up to the stadium that something isn’t right.  There’s a huge contingent of police and armed FBI types positioned outside the stadium.  Cooper is concerned about it, but the thought of turning back never crosses his mind.  He probably also believes, like everyone who watches this movie, that the FBI would ever use a concert with 27,000 innocent people in attendance as an elaborate and risky sting operation.  But that’s what the FBI is known for, right?  Doing the unexpected while putting civilians in harm’s way?

The incredulous setup of Trap is actually the least of the movie’s many narrative problems.  Cooper quickly realizes what is going on, and he repeatedly tries to find a way out of the arena.  He abandons Riley so many times that she becomes suspicious.  While Cooper is off poking the security perimeter for flaws, he easily obtains items that help him.  With no effort, he secures a security badge from a sympathetic souvenir stand worker, then a FBI radio transmitter under the noses of an armed swat team.  He’s like a video game character picking up charms along the way.  When serial killer profiler Dr. Josephine Grant (Haley Mills) attests to how cunning The Butcher is, I chuckled because the plot never requires him to use it. 

The most egregious instance of Cooper’s good luck happens when he’s looking for a way to get himself and Riley backstage to avoid the dragnet.  Doing so requires getting his daughter on the stage as part of a bit Lady Raven does for fans who have had a tough life.  Cooper spies a middle-aged Indian man and assumes he’s related to Lady Raven because she’s of Indian descent.  Of course, the man (played by M. Night Shyamalan himself) turns out to be Raven’s uncle, and believes Cooper’s sob story about Raven.  Uncle Raven proceeds to invite Cooper and Riley backstage without so much as a security check.  Yes, the movie rewards Cooper for racial profiling.

Unfortunately, getting backstage doesn’t put Cooper and Riley in the clear.  Cooper pulls the most incomprehensible move out of his sleeve to convince Lady Raven to let him and Riley ride in her limousine.  From there the movie goes even further off the rails, with one ridiculous twist followed by an even more ridiculous twist.  (Would you believe that social media can save lives?  You will!)  When the movie concluded with yet another preposterous turn of events, I wondered what the heck I just witnessed.  Was Shyamalan serious with all this?  Or did he intend this movie to be an Airplane-like send-up of serial killer thrillers?

I don’t believe M. Night Shyamalan intended Trap as a parody of the serial killer genre.  Taking the movie at face value, it’s a suspense-thriller that generates no suspense and no thrills.  For a film about a serial killer who’s desperately trying to not get caught, it’s curiously devoid of tension.  While it is true that all movies in this genre have some degree of implausibility built in, Trap leaves implausibility in the rear view mirror as it speeds down the highway going 200mph.  The actions of the characters in this movie defy logic so frequently that I had to keep myself from saying “What the f***?” out loud.

If The Butcher’s constant good fortune isn’t enough to take you out of the story, the cringe-worthy dialog certainly will.  All of Shyamalan’s movies are noteworthy for their stagey  quality, but it’s usually of a mind with the tone of the story.  The dialog in Trap is so unbelievably clunky that I wondered if the script had been translated from English into another language, then translated back again.  It would have been one thing if only The Butcher’s speech patterns were distinct from everyone else’s, because peculiar diction is a tried-and-true cinematic shorthand for abnormality.  (Think Norman Bates, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, etc.)  Unfortunately, all of the dialog in Trap is equally unconvincing in a robotic sort of way, as if the first draft of the screenplay was what was filmed.

Even though Shyamalan’s knack for dialog may not be what it used to be, he’s still an expert filmmaker at a technical level.  All of the concert footage scenes look beautiful, where the performers wear cream-colored outfits and are accentuated by purple hues.  Shyamalan is also one of the best filmmakers working today at staging scenes.  This is one of those movies where people will show you stills from a given scene as proof of its overall excellence, despite the fact that those scenes in question generate unintentional laughter.

Fortunately for Shyamalan, he gets an outsized performance from Josh Hartnett as Cooper/The Butcher.  Hartnett deserves an award for delivering so many awkward lines with complete conviction throughout the movie.  Saleka Shyamalan, who plays Lady Raven and is coincidently M. Night’s daughter, is fine in the movie.  Like the rest of the cast, she does what her father asks of her, even if everything she does to thwart The Butcher in the movie’s last third is completely preposterous.  (Would any performer who sells out arenas be allowed to move about without a security contingent surrounding her?  No.)   Speaking of the last third of the movie, Shyamalan curiously stops telling the story visually and forces the characters to explain it all.  I’d never thought I’d say this about Shyamalan, but the tedious monologuing at the end was lazy filmmaking.  Trap may be one of the best-looking bad movies ever made.  It certainly is the campiest movie Shyamalan has made to date, intentionally or otherwise.  It’s beautiful to look at, and Josh Hartnett gives it his all, but the results are neither suspenseful or thrilling.  Not Recommended.

Analysis

As I watched Trap, the list of implausible things inside my head just kept growing and growing.  I’m confident that the CinemaSins people will have a field day with the movie.  That said, my list of things that happened in the movie that made no logical sense is below.

Would the FBI really put the lives of 27,000 people in danger to capture one man?

There are so many SWAT and police around the arena, even someone who hasn’t been to a concert recently, like Cooper, would have to suspect something was up.  Couldn’t he have just gotten into a car accident to get out of it?

During the concert, law enforcement personnel routinely surround a father and drag him away.  In real life, wouldn’t they do this in a way that would draw less attention to itself?

Jamie has to be the most trusting person who ever lived.  After he hears Cooper advise Riley to be nice and learns that Cooper is a firefighter, Jamie lets Riley follow him to a secured area and lets him into that area as well.

Even more preposterous is that Jamie gives Cooper a tee shirt for free.  Those suckers cost $50 a piece.  No employee working a concert for minimum wage would ever do that.

People with security badges at concerts typically wear them on lanyards.  Lanyards are how security personnel can tell who is authorized to be where they are.  They wouldn’t be allowed to tuck their badges into their pockets like Jamie.

When Cooper wanders into an FBI swat team briefing behind locked doors, nobody bothers to check his ID.  He draws no suspicion even though he matches a possible description and at 6’ 3” sticks out like a sore thumb.

When does the swat team leader need to tell the squad about The Butcher at the arena?  Wouldn’t they have had this information long before they arrived at the scene of the operation?

Why does Cooper find an unopened carton of donuts in the cabinet?  Wouldn’t they have been left out to be eaten?

Nobody working in fast food puts their wallet into the front pocket of their apron.  When you work with grease, your apron becomes covered with it during your shift.  The last thing anyone working in that capacity would do would be to put something valuable in a spot where it would come into contact with grease, food, pop, water, etc.

I don’t understand how the profiler would identify that any of the dads at the concert were The Butcher.  All they have are vague physical descriptions.  How would they know that any of the dads they corral is The Butcher?  And how is a three concert long enough to vet 3,000 possible suspects?

Security would have thrown Jody and her mother out after they threw water at each other.

When Cooper blackmails Lady Raven into letting him and Riley drive in her limousine, the endgame of his plan is nonsensical.  If she did drop Cooper and Riley off at the corner as he asked, couldn’t Raven have ordered her driver to go to the nearest police station and tell them everything, including his description, name, license plate number, etc.

Why doesn’t Cooper just kill his latest victim and destroy his phone when he has the chance?  Instead, he keeps the guy alive as a silly threat to keep Raven in line.

Does Lady Raven really think that she can psychologically outwit The Butcher by talking to him like an angry, domineering mother?  Surely she has seen Psycho and would know that that tactic doesn’t work.

Given how Cooper knows every inch of his house and has several escape routes mapped out, wouldn’t he know that his family could escape from the upstairs room by climbing down a tree?

The entirety of Rachel’s actions depend upon her leaving part of a receipt at one of her husband’s murder houses.  You can tell Shyamalan hasn’t been to a concert in a very long time, because paper tickets haven’t been a thing for a very long time, at least since the pandemic.

Why does the FBI take so long to enter the house and subdue Cooper?  They give him enough time to sweep up and do the dishes before they finally decide to rush in.

I can understand why the FBI would use Rachel as bait, but why do they let him get a knife?  Wouldn’t the FBI have sharp shooters who could shoot him through a window once he showed up and acted hostile?

Besides, if Rachel really suspected that her husband was a serial killer, why not just tell the FBI everything?  They could follow him and catch him in the act without putting the lives of innocent civilians at risk.

How does Cooper manage to stand after eating tranquilizer-flavored pie and being tasered multiple times?

Why doesn’t the SWAT team just shoot Cooper when he advances on them?  As we see on a daily basis, all law enforcement officers shoot to kill when you don’t obey their commands.

Why does Dr. Grant let Cooper touch Riley’s bicycle?  He could easily grab it and throw it at one of them.  Furthermore, why does she let him hold his daughter?  Cooper is a serial killer, not someone convicted of embezzlement.  He could grab her and use her as a shield.

Why would the SWAT team leave Cooper completely alone in the back of the truck?

Stab Wounds

Making a movie that’s modeled after Psycho (or Raising Cain) requires a taste for wickedness that Shyamalan rarely explores.  The last time he delved into sexual perversity was with Split, where a monster kidnaps and then devours cheerleaders.  Given how tame Trap is, I can only assume that Shyamalan was so embarrassed by Split that he vowed to never let himself to do anything like that again.

We should all be glad that Shyamalan is on guard to protect us from evil, suburban, white, American families.

The only characters in the movie that seemed remotely human were Jeremy (Jonathan Langdon) and The Thinker (Kid Cudi).  Coincidentally, they play the only characters who are intentionally funny.

The Butcher’s idea of a killing room is so blase.  A drab basement with carbon monoxide as the mode of execution?  If only he had watched Tarsem’s The Cell for inspiration on how to kill someone with finesse.

Haley Mills must have watched The Exorcist: Believer and thought to herself, “If Ellen Burstyn can take a role in a terrible movie for a paycheck, so can I!”

M. Night may win the Shyamalan family “battle at the box office of 2024”, but Ishana’s The Watchers is the more interesting movie of the two.