Film Review - Trap (2024)

Trap is the new movie by M Night Shyamalan and stars Josh Hartnett as Cooper, a firefighter who is taking his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert by her favourite singer Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan) but unbeknownst to him the police have cordoned off the arena as they believe a serial killer known as the Butcher will be in the audience and as Admiral Ackbar would say It’s A Trap.

Trap for 2 thirds of its running time is good fun, the use of the concert arena is very effective with the 20,000 plus crowd to pull from as potential suspects, a food court to create distractions, a police watching from security stations and a popular singer to be a distraction and Shyamalan’s direction and writing is most effective in these moments, Hartnett in particular is great and this is a good study of face acting as his expressions give off this warm smile and girl dad persona but there is always this rage and anger ready to boil to the surface at any moment and it makes him fun to watch.

Sadly however the last third of the film gets very silly and it makes the stupid decision to take the action out of the concert arena and this part of the film drags in a major way and I sat there in my seat going “This is getting silly” and not in a good way and look this is M Night Shyamalan you know what your getting with him and I went along with it for the most part but the third act drags this down.

And I know this isn’t a 2 hour film (its 105 minutes long) but because that third act felt as long as it did I began to think to myself this was a 2 hour film and sometimes Shyamalan really struggles to stick the landing with his movies, recently he’s been quite good (2019’s Glass not withstanding) but here he slipped on the stage at the end and it’s a bit of a shame.

And so that was Trap and M Night Shyamalan continues (albeit just) his good run of films since 2015’s The Visit but that third act really drags it down, 2 and a half out of 5.