In a manhunt thriller, you can pile up ridiculous coincidences and endless strokes of luck for ironic laughs, or you can play them straight. But after 45 minutes or so, you risk audience frustration either way.
Such is the case with M. Night Shyamalan’s wobbly family affair “Trap,” a movie about a devoted but psychopathic father taking his teenaged daughter to the concert of a lifetime. In the movie the Taylor Swiftian superstar on tour is played by writer-director-producer Shyamalan’s own daughter, Saleka Shyamalan. She wrote and sings much of her own material. There’s a lot of it. To mixed results, her character, Lady Raven, takes up an increasingly important share of the storyline, around the time “Trap” starts tripping over itself in earnest.
Premise: pretty solid, actually. The father, a stalwart-on-the-surface firefighter played by a perpetually scheming Josh Hartnett, is a serial killer known only as The Butcher, with 12 victims and counting. Teenaged daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) knows only the lovable, protective, dorky side of her dad, since she’s not privy to the twitchy closeups of Hartnett that we, the audience, are fed, endlessly.
Somewhere between 83% and 91% of the plot is in the trailer. The concert’s a massively coordinated FBI sting operation, set up to ensnare the killer, to the tune of thousands of screaming fans of Lady Raven. Once the killer gets wind of the scheme, “Trap” pulls an extended variation on Norman Bates’ shower murder cleanup routine in Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” Audiences couldn’t help hope but root for Norman to hide the body, and the car, in the swamp. Here, Shyamalan has similar intentions: His movie would be nothing without Hartnett’s serial killer outfoxing his pursuers, slipping past one security barrier after another, stealing access badges willy-nilly and engineering his daughter’s onstage appearance with her idol. The backstage access that comes with that improbable narrative short-cut paves the way for the main character’s mission, which is to kill again.
Good, bad or middling, very little of Shyamalan’s works can be described as tightly plotted, well-sprung suspense. Beginning with “The Sixth Sense” and “Signs,” he has favored the unfashionable fabulist’s virtue of atmosphere and patience. (In a nastier vein, so does Osgood Perkins’ “Longlegs,” a big hit this summer.)
“Trap” works against that virtue; its plot is more of an overt pressure-cooker, or should be. It’s also somewhat alien to Shyamalan’s storytelling instincts. Ideally, a pressure cooker should feel like one, and here the editing rhythms favor an oddly languid pace and too much of his dialogue strains for jokes or reiterates story points previously established. Also: What’s up with the secondary role of the FBI profiler played by Hayley Mills? Was she cast because she starred in “The Parent Trap,” another movie with the word “Trap” in its title? She’s fine, but that’s a long way to go for an in-joke.
Hitchcock remains a primary reference point for this filmmaker. Beyond “Psycho,” there’s a striking, crimson-soaked closeup of Hartnett’s twitchy eyes, an apparent lift from Hitchcock’s 1937 film “Young and Innocent.” Shyamalan substitutes a wash of blood red for the blackface makeup worn by the killer in Hitchcock’s feature. The shot’s effective, without or without the film-nerd context. And though Hartnett has far fewer personalities to activate than James McAvoy relished in Shyamalan’s “Split,” he does all he can to make the implausibles plausible.
He is, however, an actor. Not a miracle worker.
“Trap” — 2 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG-13 (for for some violent content and brief strong language)
Running time: 1:45
How to watch: Premieres in theaters Aug. 1
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.