“It’s gonna end in the average way”

How come I haven’t seen more modern movies that are about serial killers? I mean, the last movie I saw was The Batman which is about a serial killer but I mean more…normal serial killers, not villains. Trap is about a man who is “trapped” in a concert with his daughter and is unwittingly in the dead center where the cops want him. The only problem is, they only know he’s attending the concert and nothing else.

From there starts a thrill ride of close encounters and some lucky saves and while Trap directed by M. Night Shyamalan ultimately comes out as a predictable tale, it’s not one without it’s styles. Huge production values with an actual concert set and Saleka Shyamalan singing in character, a large amount of extras and the color palette of a concert really make this film feel exciting and bold, confident at the start.

This is also the first M. Night Shyamalan film I have seen from start to finish. So I don’t have an on-going string of disappointments with him but I know that this movie like many of his other recent ones was getting middling reviews and so I was caustious about the fact that if it was gonna be any good or not. I was overall, optimistic though.

Trap ended up working for me because it’s one of the few recently released original films I have seen that doesn’t hesitant in what it’s trying to achieve, even from the opening of the credits you can tell it’s being directed by someone who is confidently handling it and that transpires in a momentum for the film itself. Trap establishes itself slickly and efficiently, within like 10 or 15 minutes you know what the premise, the problem and what the motivation of the main character played, very well, by Josh Hartnett. What this leaves the viewer with is ultimately to sit and watch it play out and a movie like that would only work if I wanted to watch it play out the sequence it set up, right? I did, I was curious and intrigued from the start.

The thing about Trap that stops it from being really excellent however, is that it’s after all the story is done, an average film. It doesn’t shatter your expectations, it doesn’t move you or really even exploring it’s “trapped” theme in the second half. Sometimes that’s okay though, and it’s not overall a bad thing. I think it’s still a fun, fun movie to watch

It also has a ton of original songs, the direction as I said has a lot of confident momentum in it and just a lot of clear great camerawork and a somewhat annoying but ultimately believable acting by Ariel Donoghue as the teenage daughter of our main character.

so overrall, I give Trap a 7/10 and I definitely recommend it to anyone who still wishes to watch an original movie that’s not based on a book or any material, a movie that as soon as you press play you are left in the cold and just being guided by it. Had a lot of fun