Sigh…
What do we do with M. Night Shyamalan? How should we assess his legacy?
I was blown away by “The Sixth Sense” when it came out in 1999. The eerie mood and shocking twist seemed to indicate a filmmaker who would deliver decades of fantastic cinema.
As a result, I tried to enjoy what came after. “Unbreakable”, “Signs”, “Split”…. They weren’t great, but I tried to talk myself into believing there were decent, that Shyamalan wasn’t just a one-hit wonder.
But in the past few years, as I’ve watched crapfests like “Old” and “Knock at the Cabin”, I basically gave up on the director.
Then “Trap” appeared in my Netflix recs, billed as not a horror film but a thriller. I thought that perhaps by switching genres, Shyamalan had recharged his creative batteries.
Nope. “Trap” is the worst movie I’ve seen all year.
The basic premise isn’t bad. A middle-aged dad, played by Josh Harnett, takes his daughter to a pop concert. Once in the concert arena, Dad notices a heavy police presence and, with a bit of detective work, discovers that the cops believe a serial killer is somewhere in the crowd.
There’s a hook there even if it feels unbelievable. Is that really how cops would handle the situation? (This movie would be an excellent training tool for police: Always do the exact opposite of what the cops in this film do.)
That’s just the first of many, many, many unbelievable things characters do. Some of these actions defy logic, some of them just defy the general laws of human behavior, but they add up to an eye-rolling mess. It’s death by a thousand cuts of stupidity.
There’s a bit of unintended humor at the end, when an FBI profiler says the serial killer is so adept at hiding their psychopathy that’s its likely no one in their life would identify them as abnormal. But by the point the actor playing the serial killer has delivered such an over the top performance replete with bugging out eyes and freakishly disingenuous smiling, you’re thinking, “how could anyone not instantly spot this person as a psycho?”
Other actors aren’t bad, even a woman who, I later discovered, is Shyamalan’s daughter. But good acting in service of a ridiculous script is almost tragic.
Anyway, I’ve learned my lesson. No more Shyamalan for me.
