Trap Parent Guide

Along with 20,000 other Philadelphians, Cooper (Josh Hartnett) and his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) are packing their way into the biggest concert of the year. Lady Raven, pop sensation, is all Riley (and, undoubtedly, every other tween girl in the country) has been able to talk about for months, and she’s beyond thrilled that her dad picked up the tickets.

On their way in to the venue, Cooper notices a lot of security - not rent-a-cop mall security – but cops and tactical teams around every corner. An illuminating conversation with a merch vendor reveals that the FBI is planning a major operation. They’ve got some evidence that a serial killer known as The Butcher will be at the show, and they’re determined to lock him in.

The catch? Cooper is The Butcher. With nowhere to go and a kid to manage, Cooper can feel the noose drawing in on him…but he’s not about to give up without a fight.

I think there’s a way to make this premise interesting. Typically, serial killer thrillers spread over a few locations and crime scenes, and that keeps the story from stagnating. In a confined space, you’ve got a real opportunity to pressurize the situation if you can keep the story moving. Unfortunately, director M. Night Shyamalan is absolutely the wrong man for that job. Most of the film consists of Cooper realizing that yes, he is pretty much stuck. The cops are everywhere, and Cooper spends a lot of time ditching Riley and wandering around the arena to find (you guessed it) more cops. The story simply doesn’t go anywhere for the first hour or so, and it makes for unbelievably boring viewing. That stagnation coupled with a generica-suburban-mall pop soundtrack makes this flick staggeringly unappealing.

Things don’t improve when the plot starts lurching along since the characters are all, kindly put, absolute morons. There’s not a single moment of normal human behavior in this tortured tale. Shyamalan needs his plot to arrive nicely at his scheduled twist ending, but he can’t wrangle actual characters into believable motivations, so people just do whatever the story demands – whether that makes any internal sense or not.

Parents will have to contend with the protagonist being a brutal serial murderer, but beyond that there isn’t too much negative content to worry about. There are very few uses of profanity, very little on screen violence, and no sexual content or drug use. It should be noted that the existence of a serial killer and images of his victims is innately disturbing, although it will bother some viewers more than others. The absence of graphic violence or sexual content, however, does not make this a film worth watching. The sloppy character writing, flat acting, and positively unbearable pacing made me feel trapped in an endless, boring void – but you don’t need to suffer my miserable fate.