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.