PREMISE
A father and his teen daughter attend a pop concert only to realize they’ve entered the center of a dark and sinister event.
THE GOOD STUFF
JOSH HARTNETT—I’m rooting for Josh Hartnett to get back to being an actual leading man. Like Robert Pattinson, he shed the teen idol image very effectively in the mid-2000s with movies like 30 DAYS OF NIGHT, LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN, MOZART AND THE WHALE, and 40 DAYS AND 40 NIGHTS. So many actors have gotten unnecessary pushes that don’t have half of the charisma or skill that Josh Hartnett did and still has.
In this movie…well, he’s trying. He is trying as hard as he can to elevate this broken material into something classy. A big part of the character is hiding the serial killer within when he’s trying to be affable to everybody around him. Hartnett nails this all the while inadvertently being funny as hell. He’s been killing it in his small roles in OPPENHEIMER and the Guy Ritchie movies he was a part of in the last two or three years. He’s always been really good, and I’m glad none of that has gone away.
THE BAD STUFF
THE DELIVERY- For some inexplicable reason, most of the characters in this movie have a moment where they look into the camera, and deliver cheesy as hell badly written dialogue. This is inadvertently one of the funniest movies of the summer because of all of this type of foolishness, and I know that was not the intent. This movie takes itself seriously AF, and the audience was rolling with laughter throughout this film.
FALSE ADVERTISING—I’m not afraid to admit this, but I do love this premise. I love the trailer of this movie, and for the most part, even through all of the silly s***, when the movie was giving me what it advertised itself to be, it was entertaining. But then that third act happened, all of the silly stuff disappeared, and this movie started taking itself way too seriously and completely lost me.
Everything that happens in this movie’s first and second act is standing on the edge of the cliff between decent and terrible. But the third act jumps right off the cliff.
THE UGLY STUFF
NEPOTISM- One of the things this movie advertised slightly in the trailers was the music of Salika, the daughter of the director of this film. I went in fully expecting to hate all of the music, but that was absolutely not the case. I thought the songs were decent enough, and musically speaking, Salika is very talented…but then she started acting.
I’m a movie nerd, folks. I’ve seen a lot of cheesy, poorly written, ‘ 90s-type s*** with a lot of flat-out B-movie-level performances. I say all this because I can quickly come to the binding resolution that I have never heard an actress of any sort deliver lines in such an unnatural way. Salika often sounds as if she is reading her lines straight from a teleprompter behind the camera. In the third act, this becomes insufferable.
CONVENIENT BULL****- Speaking of the 90s movies, I can recall a bunch of the Stallone, Snipes, Van Damme, and Steven Seagal movies where ridiculously stupidly convenient things happen in the hero’s favor to move the plot along. In the worst cases, these ’90s movies may have one or two of those moments that stand out.
This movie is a very good film to have a drinking game for. Every time the Josh Hartnett character has the most one in a million type of lucky thing happen to him to move the plot along, take a sip of beer. DO NOT TAKE A SHOT WHEN THIS HAPPENS. There are far, far, far too many times where unrealistic bull**** happens at just the right time for his character to continue his journey for you to consume hard alcohol while playing this drinking game.
Many people in the audience that I was in audibly spoke some version of “What the f***?” a number of times in the first and second acts alone. Then, the third act happened, and it almost felt like they were piping in whispered WTFs underneath the score because people were saying it so often.
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As a man at the forefront of defending M. Night Shyamalan’s legacy, boy, is this a tricky moment for me. I still will defend that he hits way more shots than he misses. But man, when he misses, he doesn’t hit the rim. It’s an airball. Actually, it’s not even an airball. It’s almost like he turns away from the basket itself and just throws the ball into the stands as hard as he possibly can into the upper deck.
I love the concept. I like the Josh Hartnett performance. But everything else is poo. A torrential downpour of fecal matter.
TRAP is in theaters now
