Trap – A solid start with shaky landing

In the same vein of recently wrapped up Olympics, let me do an analogy to start this off. While the Trap isn’t the Australian Breakdancing Sensation that scored 0, it is a gymnast that starts off strong, puts one hell of an opening only to falter at the landing, almost like they tried too hard. It’s not Biles or Chiles, but not for the lack of trying.

If you’ve watched the trailer for Trap, you’ve already enjoyed the best part of the movie…

The trailer was attention grabbing, the movie – enjoyable, however, the more you look back at it, the more cracks and missteps you see. Missed opportunities, ‘movie logic’ and forced endings.

If you’ve watched the trailer for Trap, you’ve already enjoyed the best part of the movie, this isn’t to say that the movie doesn’t deliver, it’s just that the trailer pretty much gives everything away. While I was surprised to learn it was loosely based on a real event, the meat of the movie was already given away by the trailer. It’s not because it was badly edited, but the best part of the Trap is the ‘Pitch’ of the movie.

It’s like if the trailer for Sixth Sense gave it away. You know, the massive twist, yeah that. Imagine you watched the trailer for Sixth sense, and that was right bang in the middle of it. That’s how it felt, what’s interesting is that even if that did happen, I feel Sixth Sense had accompanying narrative that would still make it a good watch.

This, not exactly.

The cast does a good job to keep you entertained, with some psychotic quirks portrayed are at times a bit too over the top, but still tastefully done that you put it down to the actor wanting to convey the maniacal energy that hides behind those eyes. The story, however, keeps building off to a payoff that just doesn’t come. Throw some weird choices in writing in the last quarter of the movie, it makes the entire experience feel like a missed opportunity.

Not to throw another analogy in there, but it’s like that picture of the horse, you know the one from the memes, starts of extremely detailed and then looks like it was finished by a 3 year old zapped up on sugar? That one.

There’s so much to enjoy in the movie, there’s a lot of small twists and turns and some moments where you expect something massive to happen, to only tease you, when in fact, nothing happens. There is merit to the writing style employed by M Night but it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that the entire movie feels like that same ‘It could have been great… but…’

I didn’t regret the watch, I’ll recommend it to fans of thrillers and M Night Shyamalan’s movies, but it’s far from his best work and far from the best thriller you’ll see this year. Or at least, I hope it is.