It is M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie. Some of his movies have been epically great. Some of them have been horrendous. You are never sure what you are going to get.

His new film has its moments, but felt as if it collapsed the longer it went and seemed to never end. Actually, it felt like it was ready to end several times.

A fire fighter named Cooper (Josh Hartnett) was attending a concert from the hot singer Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) with his teenage daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue), who was a huge Lady Raven fan. While at the concert, Cooper sees what seemed to be an excessive police presence. He discovered that the entire concert was a trap for a serial killer named The Butcher, who FBI agents had decided that their tip that the Butcher was attending this concert was good intel.

It turned out that Cooper, the good father and friendly man, was, in actuality, the Butcher and he spent the next part of the film trying to find a way out of the trap.

The first hour of the movie was actually not too bad. I did like the premise of the film and I liked how we were seeing this from the POV of Cooper. He was the main protagonist and the film seemed to want the audience to cheer for him to get away from the FBI despite the fact that he was a vicious serial killer.

I could not tell whether this was a good performance from Hartnett or if it were terrible. There were moments that it felt like Hartnett was absolutely delivering horrendous dialogue, but I think that maybe he was doing this to show that this guy struggled with feelings and that he was more of a sociopath. I am choosing to believe that these were acting choices by Hartnett as a way to show more about this character.

However, the dialogue was not very good. It felt like a typical Shyamalan film where the dialogue sounds as if it is not spoken by real people.

Lady Raven was shown performing multiple songs during this concert, and we get nearly the entire songs. It turned out that Lady Raven was M. Night’s daughter Saleka, who wrote, recorded and performed these songs on her own. It felt like a good chunk of this movie was M. Night trying to help out his daughter’s music career. I thought she was fine, and her acting, when she became a more integral figure in the plot, was, at best, okay.

A major problem with the film is that some of the things that happen are so improbable and implausible that it was hard to accept. And it only got worse as the film continued. The second half of the movie saw things happen that you really had to stretch credibility to believe.

Again, avoiding spoilers, I absolutely hated the events at the very end of the movie. Without going into anything specifics, people just do not act this way and the choices that were made are just ridiculous.

Trap was too long and it dragged on. It should have been 15-20 minutes shorter. Josh Hartnett was strong and, if he did make those specific choices during the first part of the film, then his performance certainly kept this messy film afloat. I thought this premise had some promise but it was mostly unfulfilled.

2.3 stars