Director M. Night Shyamalan has been a household name for twenty-five years, beginning in 1999, when he dominated the end of the summer with “The Sixth Sense.” Shyamalan’s work can be divided into four periods. There was the period when he was a visionary who some have compared to Spielberg (the period that includes his best films, “Unbreakable,” as well as “Signs” and “The Village”). There was the period when Shyamalan began to slip into self-mockery (“Lady in the Water,” “The Happening”), and when the idea of Shyamalan’s sudden end became more a sign of his stagnation than a sign of his entertaining.
There was a period when he left it all behind to reinvent himself as an anonymous sci-fi filmmaker (“The Last Airbender,” “After Earth”). Then there was the comeback era that began with Split (2016), a blockbuster starring James McAvoy as a talkative man with a disturbing multiple personality disorder. Since that point, Shyamalan’s brand has regained a kind of parody of its former glory. People were going out to see his movies again, but his aura as one of the best movies ever made had been replaced by outright second-rate bullshit.
You go into a new Shyamalan film assuming it will fall into that latter period, but you always hope he’ll return to the Shyamalan we first fell in love with: the slick, sleight-of-handed action artist. However, his new film, “Entrapment,” may actually herald a new era for Shyamalan. Call it a new era of the kind of contrived fantasy that makes Brian De Palma’s craziest films.
For about half of the film, we’re watching a De Palma-esque Snake Eyes movie: a real-life thriller set in a crowded performance arena, where a giant entertainment event serves as center stage and backdrop to the elaborate drama. The event, in this case, is a concert by Lady Raven, a pop star (played by Shyamalan’s daughter, Salika Shyamalan) who is a cross between Lady Gaga and Olivia Rodrigo. Her songs are vibrant and catchy (Salika Shyamalan wrote them, and they’re absolutely brilliant, as is her performance), inspiring her fans, mostly teenage girls, to sing along to every word and scream at almost every moment in awe of the Beatles.
One of those fans is Riley (Allison Donoghue), a hot middle schooler who has come to the Tanaka Arena concert with her father, Cooper (Josh Hartnett). He tries to connect with her by exuding his “I’m a modern dad!” enthusiasm as he whisks her off to the concert of her dreams. But he’s trying too hard. When he says a word like “jealousy,” it’s jarring. And while he manages to get them seats on the floor (in the forty-fourth row), her friends—or rather, the cool girls who were her friends last week, until they stopped being her friends—get better seats. On the perpetually competitive reality show about middle-class domesticity in the 21st century, that means Cooper has done his job well.
Hartnett, who has the star quality (as he always has), brings an over-the-top sweetness to the character that draws us in. At least, that is until Cooper goes to the bathroom and pulls out his cell phone… to check on the condition of the victim he has locked up in a suburban basement. It's not exactly the movie we thought we were watching. But yes, we've seen that movie, too.
Warning: This is no This is the premise of the movie “Entrapment.” Cooper is a serial killer known as the Butcher. He has 12 victims, each of whom has been dismembered. There has been a seven-year manhunt to catch him. But now, led by a veteran FBI profiler (played by former British actress Haley Mills), they have set the final trap. They know the Butcher will be attending Lady Raven’s party. That’s why they have surrounded Tanaka Square with SWAT team members; no one can get out. There are 20,000 people attending the party, 3,000 of whom are adult males. The authorities have various (conflicting) leads about the killer from surveillance footage (they’ve never seen what he looks like), and one possible clue: an animal tattoo. They know the Butcher is at the party. Their agenda is to catch him.
But you might immediately wonder: How exactly will they do it? Serial killers are notoriously adept at evading the police. And they are careful not to reveal their identities. Will the FBI interrogate each of the 3,000 men who attended the party before they leave? That will take three days. Or will the detective, who has a sixth sense, somehow figure out whether she can kill them. Known Who is he?
Cooper learns all this from a T-shirt vendor at a merchandise booth, and from the moment he learns, his agenda is to sneak out of the party. He discovers that the only way to do that is backstage, though. For a while, as Cooper does things like steal a passkey, sneak into a police pep talk, and spar with the mother (Marnie McPhail), one of his daughter’s volatile friends, we’re just going with the flow, even as everything escalates in the fantasy-like setting of Shyamalan’s Zon. Josh Hartnett is so good that we want to follow in his footsteps as a killer in the vein of Joseph Cotton’s treacherous Uncle Charlie in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt.
But then we get to the moment when Shyamalan, as he unpacks the script (I’ve long argued that Shyamalan the writer sacrifices Shyamalan the director), comes up with a surprise where someone should have looked over his shoulder and said, “No.” In fact, the film includes a cameo appearance by Shyamalan, playing the uncle of Mrs. Raven, whose role Cooper took over. It just happens This happens in the middle of the party. This allows Cooper to lie about Riley having leukemia, which is his way of getting her chosen as the dream girl to go on stage to dance with Lady Raven. All this happens… so the movie can bring Cooper backstage!
By the time Cooper engages in a private conversation with Ms. Raven in her dressing room, we’re watching a film that has abandoned all logic and plausibility. It’s not that I don’t buy the idea of this meeting; it’s that he reveals himself to her as the killer. From that point on, whatever elaborate plan he comes up with, can’t she just… figure out who he is? I guess we’re supposed to say, “Ah! It’s a trip! Take it!” But asking the audience to agree to something so far-fetched is insulting. More importantly: it’s not fun.
The second half of Entrapment is one trap door after another. The film becomes a study of Cooper: his covert moves, his issues with his mother, his split personality. He’s a butcher, yes, but he’s also a family man who loves his kids. It’s a split. A film like The Boston Strangler (1968) dealt with this sort of thing in a chilling way, but as Entrap’s contrivances balloon into something almost bizarre in their absurdity, the film raises the question: How much can we invest in a high-profile serial killer whose emotions are more believable than his escape?
