M. Night Shyamalan never met a contrivance he couldn’t direct the hell out of. Say what you will about his tangled and twisty narrative webs — less intricate than haphazardly designed — Shyamalan has a singular vision. It’s baked into the way he makes movies; a really good mode of moviemaking, which pushes suspense to the front and logic to the back. Because Shyamalan understands that we do not have to understand. That clarity matters less than feeling. That movies operate at a different register from the novel and that the caliber of exposition is often irrelevant to the success and failure of how a movie works as a movie.
If there’s a fault in his design, and there are not many, it’s that the now-expected twist, situated at the end of the story, can so often cheapen what has come before, by so suddenly changing the arc and direction and understanding of what those things were. Withholding that information and then saying, see, you just didn’t see it how I did, is a bit of a gimmick or directing parlor trick.
So, situating the gimmick upfront is really an exceptional idea for Shyamalan. When our main character in a movie is at an events center and there is some ne’er-do-well afoot, it’s never them. In Peter Hyams’ exceptional Sudden Death (1995), all the tension is about this Dad trying to prove himself to his kids while preventing a terrorist attack at the Stanley Cup Finals of the Pittsburgh Penguins. Trap is an inversion of this. Firstly, there are no fights with hockey mascots (regrettable) and secondly, the father bringing his daughter to a pop idol concert is suspect number one, and we know it. Unlike Jean Claude Van Damme trying to prove his worth as a father at a hockey game, Josh Hartnett snakily tries to evade detection that he isn’t anything more than a great father. In fact, his character is a ruthless murderer, even if he gets his daughter up on stage to dance with her idol.
The problem then, is that the movie does end up being front-loaded but this isn’t especially because the trick is also preinstalled. While we’re at the concert and Hartnett’s character is finding fun ways to evade detection while remaining not just present as a father figure but making his family center stage, hidden in plain sight, the movie is running at a steady clip. When we leave the arena and move the setting, the movie needs to continuously reestablish the stakes, and they never feel as high as when the movie started. And so we have a fundamental act-structure problem; a climax to begin with and then a series of smaller climaxes to follow, no middle, and really no end.
It’s a damn good time because Shyamalan is expert at this and Josh Hartnett popped out to be just as good. They make a great team and ought to continue working together. Their tendencies here are simpatico; the narrative thrust of the movie relies on their confluence of energy and it always works out.
Trap is a good, fun movie, with a great performance. Structural integrity aside, it’s built with purpose, directed and acted out with intention. There is a clarity about the way Shyamalan makes movies that nobody else has. Trap is such a good use of his utility as a director and with some rounded out acts and somewhere else for it to have done, could have been the ideal Summer Movie.