Parents' Guide to Trap

Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan returns with another well-directed thriller that has lots of potential and many flaws; its enthralling parts arguably slightly outweigh the ridiculous ones. The concert takes up the first half of Trap, and it's tantalizing: an enormous, expensive puzzle box with thousands of moving parts. Shyamalan's daughter, Saleka, a singer in real life, fully pulls off the part of a pop star, and the many teens at the show have all of her moves and lyrics memorized. The energy is electric. When a guest performer rises out of the floor, Cooper eyeballs the elevator mechanism, thinking maybe it's an escape. Viewers are almost complicit, perhaps hoping for him to solve the puzzle. But when the concert ends, his true cruelty comes out, and we realize our error.

Regrettably, the post-concert sequences feel increasingly implausible, and, worse, dragged out. There's scene after scene of Cooper proving how much wilier and cleverer he is than the authorities who are after him—and how deep his inhumanity goes. (He says that he chooses his victims because they seem unbroken.) Rather than finding an end to the story, Shyamalan simply shows sequence after sequence of Cooper outsmarting everyone. He goes from being a flawed character to an almost supernatural villain, and it's off-putting. Thankfully, Hartnett's performance is modulated in cunning ways so that, just when Cooper seems to teeter off balance, he rights himself again. He uses his size (he towers over all of the teens at the concert) and his sinister smile as weapons, more than he uses any physical violence. Trap might have worked better had it been more streamlined, but it works well enough for a casual viewing.