summary
- The film is based on a true case called Operation Flagship, where federal investigators disguised themselves as a sports network and arrested 101 fugitives.
- Inspired by the deceptive sting, director M. Night Shyamalan has created a tense thriller built on the absurdity of real events.
- Cooper's position in “Entrapment” is similar to the concerns expressed in “Operation Major,” blurring the line between fantasy and reality.
M. Night Shyamalan is known for making films with stunning premises and big twists, such as The sixth sense and Tags. trap It seems like another in a long line of fictional scenarios.
The film follows Cooper (Josh Hartnett), a married family man with two kids, who takes his teenage daughter Riley (Arielle Donoghue) to a concert by her favorite pop star Lady Raven (Salika Night Shyamalan's daughter). Cooper does what good parents do when he notices a large police presence, and learns from a friendly merchandise vendor that the entire concert is a trap to catch The Butcher, a serial killer who has been cutting people to pieces for years. This is worrying news for Cooper because he He is the butcher.
Over the next ninety minutes, we watch Cooper try to evade every method the feds use to catch him, each more ridiculous than the last. However, perhaps the most shocking thing is that trap It's unimaginable. In fact, Shyamalan's film is inspired by a true story… to some extent. Let's take a look at the indirect inspiration for the film. trap.
Trap inspiration… kind of.
trap
- release date
- August 2, 2024
- Throw
- Josh Hartnett, Hayley Mills, Marnie McPhail, Vanessa Smith, Salika Shyamalan, Malik Gopal, Jonathan Langdon, Peter D'Souza, Thai Pravong, Kaitlyn Dalan
events trap Inspired by a real-life case called Operation Flagship. In 1985, the U.S. Marshals Service's Fugitive Investigation Team, or FIST, launched a plan to capture a group of fugitives in Washington, D.C. They created a fictitious sports network, Flagship International Sports Television, a fictitious sports television channel on FIST. As part of the network's supposed launch, letters were sent to the last known addresses of more than 3,000 wanted men telling them they had won two free tickets to an upcoming match. The Washington Redskins (now called the Washington Commanders) and the Cincinnati Bengals were in a Super Bowl and they had a chance to win tickets to the Super Bowl. At the time, the Redskins were a very popular team and people were thrilled to have won the game.
The alleged winners attended a luncheon at the Washington Convention Center on the morning of the game to receive their tickets. They were surrounded by U.S. Marshals, who were all in the form of maintenance crews, cheerleaders, mascots, stewards, and other employees who pretended to celebrate with the escapees.They even checked the men to make sure they were really fugitives. “The sure winner is the wanted person; the double winner is the dangerous person, the person who committed an aggravated assault or a murder or a robbery,” said Toby Rush, a deputy sheriff at the time, in a 2016 documentary about the manhunt conducted by NFL Films.
The federal police then took small groups of up to 14 people to separate dance halls. Once there, as soon as the master of ceremonies announced that they were under arrest, the special operations group rushed into the room to arrest them. The trick was so good that some people were still confused even after the arrest, wondering, “Can we still go to the game?” The operation resulted in the arrest of 101 people that day.
But to the U.S. Marshals, there were several things that gave the station away, should the fugitives have had to dig around. Besides the fake sports channel, the name of the network’s president, Michael Ditnow, was a scrawled version of “I AM WANTED.” Moreover, the new network’s business manager was named Marcus Crane—“informant” spelled backwards. So the federal authorities enjoyed the operation even as they planned to make a slew of arrests.
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Shyamalan was thinking about Operation Flagship.
while trap This is not the story of Operation Pioneer, but it bears some similarities – and these similarities are not accidental. Shyamalan's film doesn't draw directly from Operation Sting, but he did remember Operation Flagship while crafting his film.“This idea came to my mind, as I remember as a kid, this event that happened in the 1980s where the police and the FBI set up an undercover operation at a public event,” Shyamalan told Dexterto.
So Shyamalan got the idea for a public event to hunt down fugitives from his story idea. “The idea was just in the spirit of the idea of being ridiculous,” Shyamalan told the BBC. “I thought it would be really funny, because when you see footage of the event, you realize it could be really funny.” [Operation Flagship] “It's funny.”
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“[The authorities] Use tampering against [the fugitives] Because they lowered their guard, which I thought was very smart.“That stuck with me,” Shyamalan said, “and I think when Salika and I were thinking about shooting a movie at a concert, I wondered, Why can't this person get out, and how can I keep them there?”
Cooper's decision to take his daughter to her favorite star's concert in trap Winning Redskins tickets is natural for this character, just as winning Redskins tickets was natural for those who were defeated by Operation Flagship. So, in the end, Trap isn't quite as unrealistic as he first seems.
