The obvious point to make at the outset is that the only real trap is the one that M Night sets for audiences on an almost perennial basis, convincing us he’s no longer up to his old tricks and then, without nary a twist, tricking us out of ninety minutes of our time. The trap has become a bit of family affair as of late, considering the entree of his twenty-something director daughter into the mix and the inclusion of his aspiring singer-songwriter daughter Saleka in a “Taylor Swift Meets Psycho” mashup entirely missing a third act, or whose third act consists entirely of Josh Hartnett taking off his shirt for no real demonstrable reason. If you haven’t seen the reclusive (for one year while he straightened things out) and absolutely darling Hartnett in one of the breakout episodes of the most recent season of Black Mirror, you have some homework to do.
His performance in this movie consists mostly of coming up with flimsy excuses to leave his seat for long periods of time during a very expensive concert. The strength of the script is that he gets to tell a lot of random dad jokes and the weakeness of the script is that he doesn’t actually talk his way out of very many situations. He spends a lot of his screentime making Help Me eyes at the screen and breaking character to find an escape hatch from the TRAP that’s been sprung on him. (Spoilers after the break.)
The first act is novel in the way that it takes a cultural phenomenon like Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and places a genre suspense thriller into that set, add to that the winning performance by Hartnett that gives the audience a surrogate sense of relief (kind of what Venom was supposed to be, and what Nimona was, reveling in the downfall of the would-be goodies in other movies) at being able to foil the authorities and worm your way out of narrow straits when the walls start to close in, but. Always the but with Shyamalan of late (although I haven’t seen Old, so maybe this is actually super unusual for him as of late!). But once he wriggles out of his TRAP by taking Saleka hostage and SHE double crosses the double-crosser, we aren’t actually left with a twist to that twist. Hartnett vacillates between being a cartoonish escape artist, the poor man’s Houdini, and a clumsy brutish bad dad with Trauma. The Trauma script that Saleka uses to try to hypnotize/subdue him as he’s making his second? third? escape is some compelling writing, but it doesn’t really last, and at a certain point we’re reduced to watching him stack Coke cans on top of each other in a trench coat to slip away from the Police, which, honestly, would’ve been a cooler way for him to trick his own daughter into thinking he wanted to spend time with her at the concert.
Friends suggested a number of cooler endings with the confrontation of at the house at the end, and maybe it’s just on the brain because of the haunting intimation in Longlegs that the murderer has to act with an accomplice or accomplices, but it’s sort of a cool idea. And by the time the doublecross to the doublecrosser happens a second? third? time in this movie it really doesn’t feel like a movie so much as self-parody.
But probably the most unforgivable thing in this movie is the sorry performance of the back up dancers during the entirety of Lady Raven’s performance. It’s almost shocking how poorly they’re dressed, in cheap, black, formless trashbag costumes for EVERY song, exerting about as much hustle as a dad reluctantly driving to spend four hours with his daughter at a imitation Taylor Swift concert.
