It’s always a bit heartwarming when a talented performer makes a public return after years of relative obscurity. They can come back like a force of nature and get their career back on the upswing, and that’s always a great success story. For today’s example, we are looking at Josh Hartnett.
Josh was a teen heartthrob of the end of the 1990’s and much of the 2000’s. Looking through his Wikipedia, you see several notations of nominations for Teen Choice Awards, MTV Movie Awards, and Saturn Awards. He was everywhere.
Even as he aged up and clearly was not getting offered Hot Teen roles anymore, he was getting cast in bigger budget outings like Lucky Number Slevin and 30 Days Of Night . It seemed like his career was maturing with him, and we’d really be seeing a lot of his growth and transformation on screen. Then the late 2000’s through the early 2020’s happened, and Josh Hartnett seemingly vanished from the face of Hollywood.
Oh, he was still working, but less so and in smaller roles in smaller pictures. And, as times works on everyone, we all just kind of moved on and didn’t think too much about him any longer. As a big Halloween franchise fan, I would watch H20 every now and then and think, “Whatever happened to that kid with the hair?” Then, all of the sudden, he was back! In the awards darling and big budget success Oppenheimer , no less! It was time for the Josh Hartnett renaissance, and his follow up to Oppy is the M.
Night Shyamalan thriller, Trap . Trap is the story of Cooper, a fireman and family man who takes his daughter to a concert for the biggest pop act on the planet, Lady Raven. But Cooper has a secret: he is actually the local serial killer known as The Butcher, and what’s more, he has another victim chained up and waiting in the wings.
Shortly into the concert, Cooper finds out that the police suspect he planned to attend the show. They’ve brought in an FBI agent to identify his patterns and predict his movements, and she is heading up a huge task force to ensure he is not able to leave the performance without being caught. Thus starts a cat-and-mouse with Cooper trying to stay one step ahead of his pursuers while not rousing too much suspicion in his daughter, Riley.
And the movie focuses on one big question: Can Cooper escape? TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS + The interesting conceit of the movie is that Cooper is our protagonist, and we don’t see any of his butchering or killing of anyone. We see he has a victim secured, but that’s it. And we follow him as he charms and plots his way through the concert venue in an attempt to find a way out of the show.
This creates a sense of empathy with the lead character within the viewer, and before you know it, you’re internally cheering for the serial killer to evade capture! There are moments during the film where I had to stop and consider, “Who does the movie want me to cheer for here?”. We are attached to Cooper for most of the run time. In the third act, the attachment subtly changes to another character when it’s time to get down to brass tacks and get into the denouement.
After building the story around Cooper and getting the audience to root for his escape, Shyamalan reverses course to remind us who we are dealing with. It’s all a very effective way to build the movie and keep the viewer off-guard. + Josh Hartnett is BACK and back hard in this one, as he turns in a dynamic and disarming performance as our lead.
He is incredibly powerful as Cooper, and that’s what builds the aforementioned rapport the movie-goer will feel with this terrible killer. But Hartnett plays a dedicated father and a charming conman. When things go well for Cooper, he is all smiles and delightfulness.
When things start boxing in on him, he loses that veneer and becomes more wild and dangerous. Hartnett is all over every aspect of the performance, and we are all reminded why he was such a star twenty years ago. – There are some strange cinematography choices that the movie makes, especially in regards to two characters talking to each other at time.
Presumably you have seen the scene from the trailer where Cooper is talking with the T-shirt salesman inside the concert venue, and the salesman gives up that the show is a trap by the FBI. In the trailer, it’s a great moment! But the problem is that in the actual scene, the two characters are each shown through really zoomed in close-ups on each of their faces. Combine that with some clunky Shyamalan dialogue, and it genuinely feels like the two human beings who are supposed to be facing each other and having a discussion are nowhere near each other.
It feels like what it probably was: two individual actors delivering lines with the other nowhere in sight. It was just a really comically unwieldy scene, I found, and it took me out of the film. – There is this weird undertheme of Cooper having Mommy Issues that the screenplay probably thought was more important than the movie itself did.
It never really gets fleshed out until the third act, but even then, it is just left feeling like this weird aspect of Cooper’s character rather than anything actually important to the plot. You really could have just done without the whole angle, and I’m not sure that anything would change much. 6.
0 The final score: review Average The 411 Trap is a really intense and enjoyable ride for most of its runtime. The biggest problem is that the third act goes on too long and has a few too many turns for my liking. By the time you get to Cooper’s last face-off with the only thing left standing between him and freedom, it feels like the film should have already ended.
I didn’t want to go in depth into this as a Down because it would be Spoiler City, though. But until you get to that moment, Trap is a very good thriller with a stand-out lead performance. legend 0 - 0.
9 Torture 1 - 1.9 Extremely Horrendous 2 - 2.9 Very Bad 3 - 3.
9 Bad 4 - 4.9 Poor 5 - 5.9 Not So Good 6 - 6.
9 Average 7 - 7.9 Good 8 - 8.9 Very Good 9 - 9.
9 Amazing 10 Virtually Perfect.
