A thriller trapped by silliness

 

 Director M. Night Shyamalan's Trap isn't a typical whodunit. The movie makes it clear from the start that a cunning serial killer lurks behind the good-guy surface of a Philadelphia father who earns his living as a fireman.

  Shyamalan casts Josh Hartnett as Cooper, a killer whose evil inclinations are never much in doubt. The suspense, such as it is, derives from a different question: Can the killer escape law enforcement and continue leading his carefully compartmentalized double life? 

  The trailer reveals the movie's main plot contrivance. Shyamalan's screenplay places Cooper at a concert in a Philadelphia arena. Teen idol Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) headlines the show. Cooper is treating his teenage daughter (Ariel Donoghue) to floor seats.

     You'll have to wait until the third act to learn how the police determined that The Butcher (aka Cooper) would attend the concert. Meanwhile, you can wonder about the judgment of cops who set a massive trap involving an arena full of screaming kids.

    Shyamalan takes a generous approach to the concert footage, giving his daughter Saleka a chance to perform several numbers. She does the singing in footage that looks convincing enough.

    Once Cooper realizes the police know that The Butcher is within their grasp, he spends most of his time trying to find an escape route from an arena that’s teeming with police officers who’ve sealed every exit.

    How will the police even know if they encounter the killer? Conveniently, The Butcher has an animal tattoo that will distinguish him from the other 2,999 men who have brought their kids to the concert. All men will be checked at the exits.

     Hayley Mills plays Dr. Grant, the genius profiler who has concocted this trap for Cooper, providing a serviceable premise for a thriller that encourages us to consider how a packed 20,000-seat arena can be secured.

     The movie depends on Harnett's performance as a genial guy who no one -- other than the audience -- suspects of being a vicious killer. Hartnett plays against his wholesome looks, offering flashes of weird behavior and murderous impulses even as he tries to be a loving father. He’s part family man, part maniac with mama issues.

      The screenplay eventually contrives to bring Cooper's wife (Alison Pill) into the proceedings, but as it unfolds, the story becomes increasingly ridiculous, even campy. It's difficult to say more without spoilers, but it's possible that Shyamalan is goofing on a well-worn genre. Maybe not.

       Whatever the case, the third act pushes credibility to absurd extremes while giving Shyamalan an opportunity to try to stick one of his twist-heavy landings. 

       All I'll say is, "Cue the eye rolls, please." 

          

How to stop the end of the world

   

  M. Night Shyamalan's Knock at the Cabin is based on a Paul G. Tremblay novel entitled The Cabin at the End of the World. Shyamalan's awkward transformation of Tremblay's title indicates what goes wrong with a potentially interesting movie.

   Not content to allow the audience to draw its own conclusions -- as the novel did -- Shyamalan steeps the story's conclusion in the kind of face-value thinking that undermines the screenplay’s stabs at ambiguity.

  Knock at the Cabin centers on two gay dads (Ben Aldridge and Jonathan Groff) who have taken their adopted Chinese daughter Wen (Kristen Cui) on vacation to a cabin in Pennsylvania.

    If an isolated setting in the woods didn't already signal trouble to anyone who has ever seen a movie, Herdis Stefansdottir's groaning score further tips Shyamalan's hand: A horror scenario involving home invasion will be flavored with quasi-religious suggestion.  

   It doesn't take long for four strangers to force their way into the cabin, carrying ominous looking homemade tools that bear little resemblance to anything available at a local hardware store. 

    Shyamalan gives us a modern version of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, harbingers of punishing global judgment: Dave Bautista's Leonard, Nikki Amuka-Bird's Sabrina, Rupert Grint's Redmond, and Abby Quinn's Adriane.

    A massive hulk of a man, Bautista's Leonard emerges as the stand-out character. In an early scene that's both lyrical and creepy, Leonard meets Wen. We wonder whether he might be the screen's latest serial killer.

   Instead, Leonard turns out to be a bespectacled second-grade teacher who speaks with alarming sincerity about his "mission." 

    He insists that he and his cohorts have had visions. They've been instructed to find this particular cabin so that global catastrophe can be averted. Only one act will stave off devastation. One of the family members must be killed by the others. 

    Are we watching a hoax perpetrated by four brainwashed strangers who we’re told met on-line or is this the real deal, the last days of humanity? 

    The home invaders have convinced themselves that their visions are real. They don't like what they've been sent to do but insist they have no choice. They implore the two dads to take action. When the dads refuse, the invaders kill one of their number and the global devastation begins.

    Leonard turns on the TV, and Shyamalan shows snippets of apocalyptic destruction. Tsunamis vanquish Hawaii. Planes fall from the sky.  

    Putting a child in danger and using the prospect of human sacrifice to drive the plot give the movie a warped undertow that's as distasteful as it is unnerving. For the most of the movie, the two dads remain tied to chairs.

     If a drama such as this is to work, we probably should be encouraged to ask ourselves what we’d do if faced with such a terrible choice. That level of involvement would have required a sense of identification Knock at the Cabin seldom delivers.

   Shyamalan creates tension as the dads try to find a way out of a horrible situation. But watching characters we hardly know struggle their way through the movie's reductive moral dilemma doesn't make it easy for us to find a way in.

‘Old’ clould have used some new tricks

      Imagine if you aged 50 years in a single day.

      Or -- on second thought -- don't bother because if you buy into M. Night Shyamalan's Old, you'll be taking a trip that's often more ludicrous than scary, mind-expanding or (heaven forbid) insightful.

     The movie begins when a family arrives at a tropical paradise, an upscale resort with a genial manager and all the amenities anyone could want. 

    Mom (Vicky Krieps) found the place online. Her husband (Gael Garcia Bernal) seems wary, but the two children -- a six-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter -- are primed for fun in the sun. 

    Well, sort of. We quickly learn that Mom and Dad are keeping a secret about Mom’s health from the kids.

    On the morning after their arrival, the hotel's manager (Gustaf Hammarsten) suggests the family visit a beautiful beach, a secluded spot he recommends only to special guests.

    The vacationers are driven to the beach along with another couple and their daughter. Before long, a couple of additional beachgoers arrive, rounding out a cast that includes Rufus Sewell, Ken Leung, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Aaron Pierre.

    Once at the beach, the characters begin a mysterious aging process that baffles and unnerves them. Don’t blame lack of sunblock.

     Those who try to escape immediately black out only to reawaken on the beach, trapped again in a rapid-aging nightmare by a steep cliff wall that makes the beach mostly inaccessible.

    Shyamalan employs make-up and adds new cast members to create the aging process, which includes episodes in which Sewell's character,  a surgeon, steadily loses his grip.  A girl becomes pregnant after starting the movie as a pre-schooler. The bones of a vain woman (Abbey Lee) calcify, turning her body into a mangled heap. 

     More cliched than perceptive, the movie has little to say aging, a topic that might given the movie real weight.

    None of the performances are notable, and I stopped trying to keep track of the cast other than to note that Alex Wolff has a somewhat extended turn as the boy of the early scenes at age 15. 

    Enough. Shyamalan has a hit-and-miss track record that includes movies such as Glass, Signs, The Village, Lady in the Water, and of course, The Sixth Sense. 

   Less mystique-oriented than some of Shyamalan's work, Old makes a lame attempt at social relevance, basing its screenplay on  Sandcastle, a graphic novel written by Pierre-Oscar-Levy and Frederick Peters.

     Not to disappoint his fans, Shyamalan gives Old one of his signature twists, a  big late-picture reveal that's easy enough to predict and which falls flat.  

     The finale strives for moral complexity but proves as unconvincing as the rest of a movie that already has drowned  in shallow thematic waters.    

       

'Glass' sounds a weak final chord

James McAvoy still stands out, but director M. Night Shyamalan brings his trilogy to a tepid close.

Director M. Night Shyamalan's superheroes arrived on screen without the cache of Marvel or DC Comics branding. No comic books made Shyamalan's characters familiar to legions of young people. In Unbreakable (2000) and Split (2016) -- the first two parts of Shyamalan's trilogy of superhero films -- Shyamalan tried to stake out his own territory.

I have friends who admire Unbreakable, a movie that I was happy to forget. I was more inclined toward Split, which featured a bravura performance by James McAvoy as a disturbed young man with 23 personalities. A 24th loomed in the person of The Beast, a superhuman killer who terrorized young women.

Before Split, Unbreakable brought two main characters to the fore: Bruce Willis portrayed David Dunn, a former football player turned security guard who discovered that he had amazing survival powers because his bones couldn't be broken. Samuel L. Jackson played Mr. Glass, an evil genius who was Dunn's opposite: Glass -- a.k.a. Elijah Price -- was born with bones that shattered easily. Ergo, Mr. Glass.

Now comes Shyamalan's attempt to bring these three characters together for a finale. Before it reaches its dreary conclusion, Glass proves downbeat and lumbering with Shyamalan vainly and (misguidedly) trying for some last-minute inspiration. Glass stands as a big-screen fizzle rather than what it should have been: a resonant symphonic chord at the end of a pop-cultural symphony.

Willis's Dunn -- a.k.a. The Overseer -- returns to stalk Philadelphia's streets with the help of his now-grown son (Spencer Treat Clark). Dunn dons a hooded rain parka when he's serving as a vigilante for good. Early on, he finds himself battling with The Beast, the most horrific member of The Horde, the name given to McAvoy's character's collection of personalities.

As those who've seen Split already know, McAvoy's Keven Wendell Crumb captures young women and torments them, turning them into an audience for a dazzling display of his multitude of personalities. He also does what some entertainers might occasionally fantasize about doing to their audiences: He kills them.

In Glass, McAvoy remains the liveliest member of the trio. Jackson's Mr. Glass spends much of the movie in a state of drug-induced stupor and Willis presents a grizzled version of a character whose economy of expression suggests an abiding depression.

Putting the three characters together inevitably reduces McAvoy's screen time, which doesn't help dispel the movie's gloomy inertia.

Credit Jackson with delivering the movie's twisted philosophy with an eloquence that makes you wish he didn't have to spend half the movie slumping in a wheelchair and not speaking.

The screenplay more or less succumbs when it contrives to place the three characters in a mental institution that's being run by Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), a psychiatrist who insists that she wants to save these misfits by convincing them that they're not superbeings but ordinary folks operating under grand delusions.

A couple of other actors reprise roles from earlier movies. In some very bad make-up, Charlayne Woodard plays Glass's mother. Anya Taylor-Joy reappears as the only young woman to have survived The Beast's murderous ways, although she seems to have forgotten that several of her friends didn't. Casey now believes she can speak to the real -- i.e., normal -- person behind all those Horde personalities, which include the conniving Patricia and fan-favorite, nine-year-old Hedwig.

You can get the general idea of what's going on without having seen either of the two previous movies, but the story will be clearer to those who understand its references and who recall prior plotting. Besides, I can't imagine why anyone who isn't a fan of the first two movies would want to see this one.

Glass can be faulted for many sins, some of them forgivable, dullness being the only one that really condemns it, a kind of torpor perhaps bred by all the gloomy atmosphere.

The movie doesn't end the way most superhero movies do. Even so, the odor of musty irrelevance settles over the whole enterprise. If you see Glass, I advise not thinking too much about what Shyamalan might be trying to say. I wonder if he knew.

He has personalities to spare

James McAvoy helps give M. Night Shyamalan's Split its charge.

First things first. Apart from The Sixth Sense, I'm not much of an M. Night Shyamalan fan. Having said that, I also have to say that Shyamalan's latest qualifies as a better-than-average horror/thriller, a movie that at its best, exhibits a nightmarish intensity.

Mostly set in a basement occupied by a loner with Dissociative Identity Disorder; i.e., multiple personalities, Split provides actor James McAvoy with a dream vehicle.

McAvoy acts out a variety of his character's 23 different personalities -- all set around a situation in which McAvoy's Kevin abducts three high-school girls and holds them as prisoners. Kevin declares his hostages "sacred food," and, in one guise or another, administers to them or scares the daylights out of them.

The kick of the movie involves the way these young women (Jessica Sula, Haley Lu Richardson and Anya Taylor-Joy) discover Kevin's various personalities, which include a nine-year-old boy named Hedwig, a prissy schoolmarmish woman and a guy who seems to regard himself as the caretaker of Kevin's underground domain. The precise location of Kevin's lair is part of the movie's mystery.

When Kevin meets with his mostly sympathetic psychiatrist (Betty Buckley), he usually appears as Barry, a flamboyant fashion designer. Buckley's character carries the burden of expanding the movie's reach. Her character believes that those suffering with D.I.D. may hold the key to a dimly understood form of human transformation.

Of the young women, only Taylor-Joy's Casey receives much by way of background; her story -- seen in flashback -- involves horrific experiences with an uncle who helped turn her into a dejected outsider.

None of this is to say that Split doesn't have exploitative elements: The girls all wear short skirts and sometimes less, the movie's climactic scenes probably push a little too hard and not all of Split proves credible.

Still, McAvoy, with shaved head and predatory grin, approaches his perverse task with obvious relish, and Shyamalan whips up plenty of tension -- even in the face of some predictable twists and turns.

January, of course, isn't known as prime territory for quality movies, but Split is creepy enough to satisfy the folks who like this sort of thing.

Stick around for the epilogue that begins during the end credits. It contains a surprise.

'The Visit' earns more scorn than cheers

M. Night Syhamalan fails to recapture horror magic.

The Visit offers yet another variation on the nauseatingly familiar "found footage" ploy, straining to give it a fresh spin.

In this case, a 15-year-old makes a documentary about a visit to grandparents she's never before met.

Director M. Night Shyamalan leavens latest plunge into horror film with a bit of macabre comedy, but The Visit is no triumph for Shyamalan, who's making a return trip to the arena where modestly budgeted chillers live.

The movie may be seen by some as a restoration of a career that has dipped and sagged since Shyamalan's breakthrough with 1999's The Sixth Sense.

Don't count me in that group. I suppose it's possible to argue that The Visit represents an improvement after duds such as After Earth and The Last Airbender, but we're talking about an awkward leap over a low bar.

The Visit contains a trademark Shyamalan surprise twist, but the movie is neither funny or scary enough to thrive, primarily because it has no credible psychological underpinnings.

The Visit serves up standard horror tropes, while trying to convince us that it's not really following a familiar blueprint. At times, it tries to goof on ploys we know too well: warnings to stay out of creepy basements and such.

The movie begins when a single mother (Kathryn Hahn) sends her two children -- 15-year-old Rebecca (Olivia DeJonge) and 13-year-old Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) to visit their grandparents.

The catch: Hahn's character left home when she was 19, and hasn't talked to her parents in 16 years. When Grandma and Grandpa first expressed a desire to meet their grandchildren, Mom resisted. She ultimately agreed because the kids thought it was a good idea and because Mom wanted to take a trip with her latest boyfriend.

For no good reason other than lame comic relief, Tyler fancies himself a rapper. When he and camera-toting Rebecca arrive at their grandparents' rural home, they quickly learn that Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie) are a couple of weird old coots.

I won't describe all of the weirdness, but you should know that one of them involves Pop Pop's penchant for storing his dirty adult diapers in a shed. And, no, that's not the last use to which Shyamalan puts those filthy diapers.

For her part, Nana sometimes runs around the house at night sans clothing, either vomiting or clawing at the walls.

All of these bizarre shenanigans are sloughed off as typical behavior from old people, a suggestion that's both unbelievable and offensive.

OK, there are some strange amusements here (Pop Pop's commitment to highly competitive games of Yahtzee, for example) and a couple of well-presented jolts, which can't be described without adding spoilers.

But so what?

The movie's ending -- gross and violent -- goes way over-the-top before Shyamalan adds a quasi-dramatic coda, along with a supposedly comic footnote, both of which play like apologies for everything that we've already seen.

I've always liked Hahn, and she's quite good in the small role as Mom. But Hahn's minimal presence only served to remind me that the rest of this dumb movie has very little to offer.

Two Smiths, one lifeless movie

A dull and derivative After Earth teams Will and Jaden Smith.

In After Earth, Will Smith spends a lot of time trying to remain conscious. He has good reason. His character -- a prime commander in a futuristic army -- suffers two broken legs when an astroid storm causes his spacecraft to crash.

Unfortunately, I, too, had to struggle to stay awake during After Earth, and for equally good reasons. This latest project from M. Night Shyamalan -- a director whose success with The Sixth Sense gave him an elite status that his subsequent work seldom justifies -- is dull, derivative and doomed by a script that displays little by way of inspired imagination when it comes to envisioning a dystopian future. Yes, that again.

For a movie that teams Smith with his son, Jaden, After Death finds surprisingly little emotion in the father/son relationship at the movie's core. Blame here doesn't necessarily fall on the actors' shoulders: Smith worked well with his son in The Pursuit of Happiness (2006), and Jaden has had successes of his own, notably the 2010 remake of The Karate Kid.

One of the movie's major miscalculations involves Will Smith's character, Cypher Raige. Cypher (could there be a worse name for a character?) is a spit-and-polish, no-nonsense general who treats his son more as an army recruit than a young person he loves. To play such a stern father, Smith reduces his performance to a monotonous display of stoicism and military bearing.

The duty-bound Raige has been a mostly absent father: He's been busy fighting aliens, leaving his son in the care of his mom (a badly underutilized Sophie Okonedo). A backstory about about Raige's older daughter (Zoe Isabella Kravitz), makes its way into awkwardly introduced flashbacks and into scenes in which Jaden's character hallucinates about her.

The action begins 1,000 years after people were forced to evacuate the Earth, a planet made uninhabitable by human stupidity and aggression. After the devastation, humans fled to the planet Nova Prime, where they constructed bland futuristic cities and battled hostile alien creatures who evidently didn't appreciate being colonized.

In an effort to create a stronger bond with his son, Kitai, Raige takes the kid on a mission that goes awry with the spaceship crash. Father and son are the only survivors.

The rest of the movie finds the injured Raige using what's left of the craft's equipment to monitor his son's journey through forbidding forests as he tries to retrieve a device that can beam a signal to rescuers. The ship's tail, where the last such functioning device was kept, broke off far from where the main body of the vessel hit ground.

The movie follows a classically mythic structure based on Kitai's maturation. He confronts obstacles, faces his fears, and, finally, must do battle with an alien monster.

No fair picking on Jaden, who's too young to endure any critical scorn, but I was puzzled by the fact that Smith -- who takes a story credit and who serves as one of the movie's producers -- decided that this turgid concoction would make for an exciting father/son vehicle.

The movie's action set pieces -- Kitai confronts a fierce mama eagle, snarling big cats, a group of ferocious monkeys and more -- hardly qualify as edge-of-the-seat entertainment, partly because they're so obviously the result of computer-generated artistry.

If you're a stickler for consistency and credibility in the creation of a sci-fi universe, bring a scorecard: You'll find plenty of missteps to keep you busy.

Smith's character speaks to his son in clipped, lifeless dialogue. He encourages Kitai to carry out certain tasks "ASP," and when the youngster is on the verge of being overcome by panic, dad tells him to "take a knee."

Upon hearing this advice, the youngster drops to one knee and tries to collect himself before moving on to the next uninspired and enervating adventure.

After Earth doesn't qualify as an epic catastrophe, but it's a long way from anyone's best work. In this summer's lineup, it may well wind up being little more than an afterthought.