The Killer: A well-crafted slayride

The Killer (2024) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity and frequent strong, bloody violence

Available via: Peacock

By Derrick Bang

I’ve of two minds about this film.

 

On the one hand, I respect the feelings of purists; goodness, I’m one of them.

 

On the other hand, we must acknowledge the march of time, and changing styles.

 

Onward, then:

 

********

 

Directors don’t often remake their own films, although notable exceptions exist: Cecil B. DeMille (The 10 Commandments, 1923 and ’56), Frank Capra (Lady for a Day and Pocketful of Miracles, 1933 and ’61), Alfred Hitchcock (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934 and ’56), George Sluizer (The Vanishing, 1988 and ’93), and Michael Mann (L.A. Takedown and Heat, 1989 and ’95) leap to mind.

 

Veteran cop Sey (Omar Sy) may think that he has the handcuffed Zee
(Nathalie Emmanuel) under control, but he reckons not with her cunning, quick wit
and lightning-fast resourcefulness.

Celebrated Hong Kong action director John Woo now joins their ranks, with this English-language remake of his 1989 classic: widely considered one of the greatest action thrillers ever made, and which strongly influenced filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. (And Woo’s 35-year gap tops all the others mentioned above.)

When asked about his two versions of Man Who Knew Too Much by fellow filmmaker François Truffaut, in the latter’s influential 1966 book-length interview, Hitchcock/Truffaut, the Master of Suspense immodestly replied, “Let’s say the first version is the work of a talented amateur, and the second was made by a professional.”

 

The same can be said of Woo’s two cracks at The Killer. This new version boasts Mauro Fiore’s vastly superior cinematography, and is a brighter, sharper “daytime experience,” as opposed to the original’s grainier, dingier “nighttime look.” The split-screen touches and cleverly presented flashbacks also are quite cool.

 

The new film’s gender switch is a novel touch. Scripters Brian Helgeland, Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken also modified and expanded Woo’s 1989 screenplay, making the plot more relevant to real-world events, and altering interpersonal dynamics in ways that definitely improve the story. It’s easier to like these characters.

 

(Although ... should we?)

 

The original’s brooding, almost overwhelming atmosphere of Shakespearean tragedy has been replaced with a greater sense of fun and dark humor, which likely will play better with modern audiences.

 

However...

 

Woo’s longtime fans are certain to decry the loss of that relentless sense of foreboding, and with justification. More crucially, this new version lacks the breathless, chaotic energy of the first film’s multiple melees, chases, and mano a mano face-offs. The stunt work may be cleaner and more inventively edited here — credit for the latter to Zach Staenberg — but only a handful of sequences possess the thrilling, balls-to-the-wall mayhem that occurred more than half a dozen times in the original, which — let’s not forget — put Woo on the cinematic map.

 

That’s a shame.

 

(However, we do get a welcome reprise of the tense, straight-armed handgun pas de deux between the two primary characters, which is so iconic in the first film)

Blink Twice: Once would have been enough

Blink Twice (2024) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for strong violent content, sexual assault, drug use and frequent profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.25.24

It remains one of life’s most important lessons, applicable in all manner of circumstances:

 

If something looks and/or sounds too good to be true ... it almost certainly is. Be wary.

 

Tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) seems unduly concerned that Frida
(Naomi Ackie) has a good time, while cavorting day and night on his private island.
She begins to wonder why he keeps asking...

Director Zoë Kravitz and co-writer E.T. Feigenbaum have concocted an intriguing little thriller around this premise, but — alas — the result would have played better as a one-hour episode of television’s Black Mirror. At 102 minutes, Kravitz’s film wears out its welcome, mostly due to a protracted first act that is much too long.

Apartment mates and BFFs Frida (Naomi Ackie) and Jess (Alia Shawkat) work together as cocktail waitresses for a catering company that’s often hired by upper-echelon clients. Frida has long been intrigued by tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum), who recently reappeared after having dropped out of sight for a year, following bad behavior and a series of scandalous headlines.

 

He has been making the media rounds on an apology tour, and the public seems willing to forgive and forget. Among other things, everybody is fascinated by the fact that he has bought his own private island, where all food is grown and raised in a self-sustaining manner.

 

A bit later, Frida and Jess crash a posh event featuring King; an accident involving high heels brings him to Frida’s rescue. They spend the evening revolving in and out of each other’s orbit, but then King begs off, explaining that he and his friends are heading to his island for a retreat.

 

She watches him depart ... but then he turns around, steps back, and hesitantly asks, “Do you want to come along?”

 

A deliriously giddy Frida and Jess board King’s private jet with his posse: Vic (Christian Slater), the token jerk; Tom (Haley Joel Osment), apparently benign but prone to temper; Cody (Simon Rex), the resident chef; and Lucas (Levon Hawke), who seems far too innocent for this group.

 

These five guys also are accompanied by three other women: Sarah (Adria Arjona), a confident Survivor alum; and party gal Camila (Liz Caribel); and Heather (Trew Mullen), the latter an unapologetic stoner.

 

Upon landing, Frida and Jess are awe-struck by King’s palatial home, the luxurious pool and surrounding grounds, and the always attentive staff. The two gals do find it odd, however, that their private bedrooms already are stocked with clothes that fit them perfectly.

 

(At which point, I glanced at Constant Companion and said, “This is when you’d run for the hills, right?” To which she replied, “Oh, yes.”)

The Union: Spy VERY lite

The Union (2024) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for violence, sexual candor, and occasional profanity

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang

The bar is getting awfully low, when it comes to spy thrillers.

 

Writers Joe Barton and David Guggenheim didn’t do much to earn their keep; you won’t find a single original thought here. Their barely-there premise lifts clichés from countless other (superior) films, adding just enough plot to justify the requisite half-dozen action and chase sequences.

 

Although every attempt to stay ahead of countless unspecified attackers fails miserably,
Mike (Mark Wahlberg) and Roxanne (Halle Berry) always survive to fight another day.

This script couldn’t have filled more than a single sheet of paper ... and that’s pretty much what wound up on the screen.

Events kick off during a prologue, as seasoned operatives Roxanne Hart (Halle Berry) and Nick Faraday (Mike Colter) lead a team to capture a guy planning to auction a suitcase that contains a priceless whatzit. The operation goes south; Roxanne’s entire team is killed, along with their target, and unspecified Bad Guys get away with the suitcase.

 

(We never know who any of these adversaries are, or for whom they work; they’re simply Black-Clad Bad Guys who arrive in Black Cars and Black Helicopters.)

 

Turns out Roxanne works for The Union, which — stop me, if you’ve heard this before — tackles worldwide catastrophes that other U.S. government spy agencies aren’t able to handle.

 

(“The Union”? Seriously? That sounds like a labor organization. Would it have been asking too much, for Barton and Guggenheim to come up with a catchy acronym?)

 

The sought-after whatzit is a computer file that contains a list of every individual working for Western-allied agencies throughout the world: CIA, FBI, MI5 and MI6, France’s DGSE, and so forth.

 

(One wonders how such a list could have been assembled. Do they all subscribe to the same magazine? Share the same Amazon shopping account?)

 

Those in possession of the suitcase intend to sell it to the highest bidder, during a black-market auction. Union head honcho Tom Brennan (J.K. Simmons) hopes to put one of his own “friendly” bidders in play, to surmount offers from five international bad actors: China, North Korea, Syria, Russia and Iran. But since all active agents would be recognized — due to the aforementioned list — this “friendly” must be some sort of regular guy.

 

Which — and this is an awfully big leap — makes Roxanne think of her former high school boyfriend, Mike McKenna (Mark Wahlberg), who remained in New Jersey and is employed as a blue-collar bridge worker. Wahlberg doesn’t need to stretch, since such roles have become his signature: a hard-working, hard-partying good ol’ boy with a solid moral compass and limited ambition.

 

He's also sleeping with his seventh-grade school teacher: a “gag” that doesn’t begin to work (and suffers more from repetition).

Between the Temples: Insufferable direction sabotages a sweet story

Between the Temples (2024) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity and explicit sexual references

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

A tender, poignant love story is all but obliterated by the relentless barrage of stylistic tics and hiccups courtesy of director Nathan Silver, who — at times — has made his little film just this side of unwatchable.

 

When Carla (Carol Kane) has trouble properly pronouncing many of the Hebrew terms
in the bat mitzvah ceremony, Ben (Jason Schwartzman) helps by "playing" them
on a guitar.

Although the setting is modern-day upstate New York, the style is a throwback to 1960s cinema verité: grainy, 16mm film stock; claustrophobic settings, and a roving camera that follows the actors as if they were characters in a stage play; and Robert Altman-esque overlapping dialogue, which — because of the low budget and poor sound quality — often makes it damn difficult to understand what people are saying.

Worse yet, Silver and cinematographer Sean Price Williams favor tight-tight-tight close-ups to an ludicrous degree. I mean, seriously: Do we really need to zoom in on a woman’s mouth, as she eats some crackers? Along with an endless array of shots that show only portions of a given person’s face?

 

If all this clutter serves some artistic or symbolic purpose, it eludes me.

 

Jason Schwartzman stars as Ben Gottlieb, a small-town cantor at the local synagogue. He has lost his “bliss” following the tragic and untimely death of his wife, Ruth, a year earlier. Since then, he has been unable to sing ... and a synagogue cantor who can’t sing, is about as useless as the proverbial screen door on a submarine.

 

His two mothers, in an effort to bring him out of his funk — the doting, sympathetic Meira (Caroline Aaron) and overly stern and critical Judith (Dolly De Leon) — try to “solve” the problem by setting Ben up with an endless stream of inappropriate, sneak-attack blind dates.

 

The one we meet, as this film begins, is over-the-top bizarre in a manner that may have intended to be humorous, but Silver and co-scripter C. Mason Wells exaggerated her to the point of absurdity. Or maybe the actress in question improvised her brief scene. Either way, this prologue is so Out There, that it may prompt viewers to flee the theater.

 

Aaron’s Meira is the model mother: patient, sensitive to others, and always ready with a kind word. In great contrast, De Leon plays Judith as an cold-hearted, judgmental control freak ... which is ironic, since she and Meira likely faced their share of intolerance, during the early days of their relationship. It’s hard to think kindly of Judith.

Greedy People: Crime really doesn't pay!

Greedy People (2024) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for violence, sexual content and relentless profanity

Available via: Movie theaters and video-on-demand

By Derrick Bang

They don’t come much darker than this one.

 

At first blush, this modern crime noir from director Potsy Ponciroli and writer Mike Vukadinovich looks like it’ll occupy the darkly humorous neighborhood populated by sardonic classics such as Fargo and In Bruges. The occasional dollops of humor are twisted: driven both by a bevy of burlesque characters and a plot that is far more comically convoluted than it initially appears.

 

The story cooked up by Will (Hamish Patel, left) and Terry (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), in an
effort to explain a woman's grisly death, doesn't withstand the smell test ... but they
nonetheless stick to it.

Midway through the second act, though, Vukadinovich delivers an unexpected wallop that destroys what’s left of a humorous tone.

People who make films of this nature understand that some boundaries shouldn’t be crossed; call them Thou Shalt Nots. Savvy writers and directors recognize that, no matter how twisted or deplorably their characters behave, it’s wise to avoid Thou Shalt Nots, lest viewers be outraged and alienated past the point of forgiveness.

 

Occasionally, though, really savvy directors and/or writers sometimes take that risk, assuming that their filmmaking chops are solid enough to hold the audience. John Carpenter (in)famously violated a Thou Shalt Not at the beginning of 1976’s Assault on Precinct 13, gambling that he’d maintain a level of suspense that would make the move worthwhile. He won that gamble.

 

And goodness; the entire John Wick film series owes its longevity to a Thou Shalt Not broken in the initial 2014 entry.

 

I’m less persuaded that Ponciroli and Vukadinovich are similarly successful here, although the aforementioned wallop definitely plunges their film into much deeper waters.

 

The time is the present, in the sleepy Northeastern coastal island community of Providence (not to be confused with Rhode Island’s capital city). Rookie policeman Will (Himesh Patel) and his very pregnant wife Paige (Lily James) moved into town just three days earlier; they’re still waist-high in unpacked boxes.

 

Will dutifully reports for work on this, his first day; he’s given a brief rundown by Captain Murphy (Uzo Aduba). We’ve already seen her earlier this same morning, at home, still mourning the loss of a young child. Murphy assigns Will to a week of training with veteran cop Terry (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), after which the newcomer will get his own vehicle and beat.

 

Will is an inherently honest family guy who believes in the social stabilization of moral law enforcement. Terry is an opportunistic, foul-mouthed horse’s ass who views police work as an easy path to free coffee and donuts, while rousting and threatening folks for the sheer joy of it. They have nothing in common.

 

Terry acts according to three personal rules, the first of which is, Try Not To Kill Anybody. “It gets messy,” he tells a bewildered Will. 

 

Because, really, who would need killing in a place like Providence?

My Penguin Friend: Absolutely enchanting

My Penguin Friend (2024) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG, for no particularly reason

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.18.24

Forget about kittens, bunnies and puppies ... even Pembroke Welsh Corgi puppies, which are adorable beyond words.

 

Even so, nothing on God’s Earth is cuter than a penguin.

 

Everybody in the village is captivated by the Magellanic penguin that has become a
constant companion to one of the local fishermen. Young Lucia (Duda Galvão,
standing just to the bird's left) names it DinDim.

Director David Schurmann’s modest dramatic charmer is the best family-friendly film I’ve seen in quite awhile, and the fact that it’s inspired by actual events is the icing on the cake.

Scripters Kristen Lazarian and Paulina Lagudi Ulrich embellished the truth a bit, in order to supply back-story and dramatic heft to what already was an astonishing saga. That’s certainly fair; this is a movie, not a documentary, and the result is heartwarming and totally captivating.

 

Events begin in the small beach community of Ilha Grande, near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. João (Pedro Urizzi) is one of dozens of young men who eke out a living by fishing, rising early each morning to prepare boats and nets. He and his wife, Maria (Amanda Magalhães), have a young son, Miguel (Juan José Garnica); the boy loves soccer and dotes on his father. As a birthday present, he begs to tag along the next morning, to help fish in lieu of attending school.

 

A storm kicks up; tragedy ensues.

 

Decades pass. João (now played by Jean Reno) has become a withdrawn misanthrope: broken, barely speaking, shunning the friends and neighbors with whom he once worked alongside, setting up his boat and nets well away from the other aging fishermen. Even Maria (now Adriana Barraza) doesn’t know how to reach him, and her quiet anguish is palpable.

 

Elsewhere — in Patagonia, Argentina — a colony of Magellanic penguins takes to the water, driven by migration instinct. After an undetermined amount of time, one gets separated from the others ... and, worse yet, blunders into an oil spill and is quickly covered. Now almost unable to swim, it struggles forward.

 

Back in Ilha Grande, while preparing for another day of fishing, João spots something floating atop the water, just off the beach. He hastens to it, and discovers a penguin in severe distress, covered in oil. João takes it home, calms it with a sardine breakfast, and begins the laborious process of cleaning off the oil. 

 

At first Maria views this newcomer as unwanted vermin, but she sees a change in her husband; he’s renewed by a sense of purpose, and the knowledge that he’s able to help this little creature. It’s still weak and vulnerable; João makes it a tiny sweater from some leftover material.

 

(If subsequent scenes of this little bird waddling around João and Maria’s home, in its makeshift sweater, isn’t the most endearing thing ever ... well, you have no heart.)

Alien: Romulus — Been there, endured that

Alien: Romulus (2024) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for gory violence and relentless profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.1.24

This is what happens, when children recklessly steal a spaceship...

 

I greeted this ninth (!) Alien entry with a weary sense of Seriously? Must we do this again? 

 

Needing to reach another portion of this enormous space station, but with their sole path
blocked by scores of adult xenomorphs, Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and Andy (David Jonsson)
consider their limited options.

This franchise envisions a bleak and depressing future; most characters inevitably die horribly; the eponymous xenomorphs always rise again (if not in a given installment, then elsewhere in the universe); lather, rinse, repeat.

No matter what the set-up, the execution is resignedly predictable.

 

That said, and for the benefit of those who might be approaching this as their first Alien saga...

 

To his credit, director/co-scripter Fede Alvarez delivers a solid first act populated by a handful of reasonably well-crafted characters. (But given that every member of this small cast is in his/her early or mid-20s, one is tempted to re-title this film Alien: 90210.)

 

The second act also features a very clever nod back to the film that begat this franchise, accompanied by several familiar bars of Jerry Goldsmith’s score for that 1979 classic.

 

However ... Alvarez and co-scripter Rodo Sayagues then squander that good will with an eye-rolling third act that piles ludicrous atop preposterous, with a soupçon of ridiculous tossed in for bad measure.

 

Tsk, tsk, tsk.

 

Alien and 1986’s Aliens were game-changing events.

 

This is just a routine horror flick, albeit with impressive sci-fi trappings.

 

The year is 2142, which — in the series timeline — is one generation after Alien (2122) and not quite two generations before Aliens (2169). The setting: Jackson’s Star, a mining colony on a ringed planet with an atmosphere so thick that sunshine never penetrates. The vast majority of the colony’s inhabitants are underpaid laborers indentured to the Weyland-Yutani Corporation (the mostly unseen villains throughout this entire series).

 

The corporation has a nasty habit of changing the rules as it sees fit, which Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) discovers, to her dismay. She happily believes that — having served her required contract work hours — she now can travel to a much more hospitable world ... only to be told that her contract requirement has just been doubled. (Given Rain’s obvious youth, and the length of time necessary to hit her initial quota, we’re also clearly dealing with violations of reasonable child labor laws.)

 

Depressed beyond words, she’s susceptible when fellow miner and ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) proposes a risky means of escaping Jackson’s Star. He and three others — his sister Kay (Isabela Merced), fellow miner Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and tech-savvy Navarro (Aileen Wu) — have detected a derelict Weyland-Yutani spaceship in descending orbit around the planet.

 

The hope is that it’ll contain functional cryo-pods, for the suspended animation sleep necessary during a lengthy journey to their desired distant planet. The plan, then, is to “borrow” the Corbelan — one of the mining operation’s utilitarian spaceships — to reach the derelict vessel, transfer its cryo-pods to their ship, and then just keep going.

 

Jackpot!: No winners here

Jackpot! (2024) • View trailer

No stars: TURKEY. Rated R, for violence, vulgar sexual content, and pervasive profanity

Available via: Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang

I thought Trap would be the summer’s worst movie.

 

But no; this abysmal, live-action cartoon defies description. (I’ll nonetheless give it a shot.)

 

Although Katie (Awkwafina) and Noel (John Cena) cleverly think to hide in a rich
musician's panic room, there's still the matter of closing the door before their hundreds
of pursuers force their way inside.

The budget apparently came from what all involved pooled from their weekly lunch money. Sets and locations are limited to existing Los Angeles-area venues, each briefly closed for the 15 minutes required to shoot one take of each scene. Most “costumes” go no further than street clothes.

Aside from the top half-dozen roles, all other characters appear to have been cast with random folks snatched from the streets; they certainly can’t act a whit. They aren’t even granted names in the cast list; they’re instead billed as Scary Goth Guy, Baby Puppeteer, Asshole Dad, Food Truck Guy, Bald Alley Cop, and so forth.

 

Paul Feig hardly warrants his credit as director; he appears to have told cinematographer John Schwartzman to point the camera, turn it on, and film whatever each untrained idiot felt like doing at that particular moment.

 

Rob Yescombe similarly doesn’t deserve to be acknowledged for his so-called script, because most — all? — of the dialogue appears to have been improvised on the spot. And quite badly, in most cases. It’s the sort of “banter” that regards relentless F-bombs as the height of comedy.

 

This may be the worst case of lunatics running the asylum ever foisted on an unsuspecting public. Grade-school theater productions are more convincing.

 

Until now, I’d have believed Awkwafina incapable of making a bad movie, and possessing the good sense to avoid anything that smelled of one. (Wrong again.)

 

As a sidebar, I’ve never cared for the tasteless “state-sanctioned murder as a cathartic escape valve” subgenre that has become popular of late. Japan’s Battle Royale, unleashed in 2000, started this dystopian trend;  2013’s The Purge and its (thus far) five sequels turned it into a deplorable franchise. By the time South Korea’s Squid Game came along, three years ago, the concept had become mainstream ... which doesn’t say anything good about human nature.

 

This pathetic turkey joins their ranks. It might be the most shameful yet, since it’s supposed to be a comedy.

 

It Ends with Us: Too dreamy to be true

It Ends with Us (2024) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for sexual content, dramatic intensity, and fleeting profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.11.24

Lily (Blake Lively) and Ryle (Justin Baldoni) share a marvelous meet-cute encounter shortly after this romantic swooner begins.

 

Allysa (Jenny Slate, left) eventually learns to love flowers just as much as her new bestie,
Lily (Blake Lively), who has long dreamed of owning a trendy flower shop.

She has perched on the roof of a tall, trendy Boston apartment complex, contemplating her life. He blasts through the door, frustrated by the events of a ghastly day. 

They notice each other. (How could they not? They’re both incredibly gorgeous.) They make an effort at chatting, at first warily. The mood turns combustible, their smiles grow teasing, their banter increasingly flirty. It’s a classic Hollywood moment, the likes of which we don’t often see these days.

 

Alas, circumstances prompt Ryle to return to work, so they part.

 

That aside...

 

We also watched, during the preceding prologue, as Lily returned to her home town of Plethora, Maine, to attend her father’s funeral. She made a point of not visiting shortly before he died; now, poised to give a brief eulogy — the church laden with people honoring this great man, this pillar of the community — she balks, and flees without a word ... much to the embarrassed consternation of her mother, Jenny (Amy Morton).

 

Fans of Colleen Hoover’s 2016 romance novel, on which this film is based, will know what’s to come; they’ll watch for little details that’ll probably slip past unsuspecting viewers. 

 

But seriously; with a title like It Ends with Us, things can go only one of two ways ... right?

 

Jenny wants her only child to remain in Plethora, but Lily — her full name being Lily Blossom Bloom, an obvious strike against her parents — is determined to remain in Boston. Her lifelong goal: to open (what else?) a flower shop. She rents a dilapidated building, begins the herculean clean-up process, and has a second meet-cute encounter: this time with passerby Allysa (Jenny Slate), who has long wondered what the inside of this place looks like.

 

The two women spar playfully; Allysa confesses that she hates flowers, “because they’re dead.” (Lily finds this amusing.) Allysa nonetheless needs a job, and Lily needs help; what could be more perfect?

 

Where Lily and Ryle had instant sensual chemistry, Lily and Allysa quickly become as tight as mutually devoted sisters. Slate is delightful: bubbly, spontaneous, outgoing and — we soon learn — sharply observant. Allysa is married to Marshall (Hasan Minhaj), a similar force of nature, and Ryle happens to be her brother. (What a coincidence!)

 

Ryle then mounts the world’s most persistent wooing campaign, but Lily resists ... sort of. She’s determined to find love, whereas he prefers casual relationships.

Trap: Don't fall in it

Trap (2024) • View trailer

One star (out of five). Rated PG-13, for violent content, disturbing images, and fleeting profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang 

Every time I suffer through another M. Night Shyamalan fiasco, I exit the theater thinking, I’m done with this guy.

 

And yet ... here I am again.

 

Riley (Ariel Donoghue) is loving every minute of the stadium concert featuring her
favorite musician, particularly since her father (Josh Hartnett) is sharing the
experience with her. But why is the place laden with so many armed cops?

The creative talent he possessed, back in the days of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, has eluded him for many years; since then we’ve endured string of insufferably stupid stories, laden with characters who speak and behave in a manner wholly removed from reality. 

Honestly, he doesn’t even try now; his recent films have been classic examples of the “idiot plot,” which lurches from one scene to the next, only because each and every character behaves like an idiot at all times.

 

Trap is no different ... although, in fairness, one character is allowed to be smart (but I’ll not say who, since that would be a major spoiler).

 

The prologue seems ordinary enough, as doting father Cooper (Josh Hartnett) and his teenage daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) attend a sold-out stadium concert starring her OMG all-time-favorite singer/songwriter, Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan). Riley is beside herself with delight, her enthusiasm radiating like the sun’s rays.

 

But the atmosphere is a little off. The presence of armed cops seems way excessive, even in these dangerous times. Once the concert begins, Cooper seems overly obsessed by this heightened security; he’s also a bit OCD and tense. Hartnett plays this well, his eyes open a bit too wide, his cheerfulness oddly forced.

 

While father and daughter prowl the outer foyers during intermission, a merch vendor lets slip the truth: Police and the FBI learned that a notorious serial killer, dubbed The Butcher, would be attending this performance ... so they’ve arrived in force, determined to capture him.

 

(Actually, “in force” is an understatement; it looks like the place is filled with every cop in Philadelphia, along with massive contingents from the neighboring five states.)

 

Okay, let’s unpack this a bit.

 

We’re expected to believe that law enforcement would jeopardize tens of thousands of innocent concertgoers, knowing that a cornered lunatic could maim and kill God knows how many of them?

 

On top of which, given the tone that Shyamalan takes, are we seriously expected to hope that this guy, via guile and ingenious maneuvers, does evade capture? We’re supposed to cheer a maniac who — over time — dismembered 12 earlier victims, leaving body parts strewn all over the landscape? A guy who, as we watch, creates a distraction by permanently disfiguring a fast-food worker, when she gets hit in the face with scalding-hot French fry oil?

 

Sorry, but that’s just sick.