Darwinskid

Josh Hartnett delivers his best Nicolas Cage in M. Night Shyamalan's latest thriller about a father who takes his daughter to see their favorite pop star in concert, but it turns out that there is a lot more going on behind the scenes.

Shyamalan is quite frankly a frustrating director. When he hits high, he hits high, but when he strikes low, boy does he strike low.

In one corner, you have The Sixth Sense, but in the other you have The Last Airbender. Sometimes though, he hits right in the middle, where some things are handled well while others are not. Trap falls right in the middle between the two extremes, the premise is interesting and for the first half there is an intriguing Alfred Hitchcock kind of vibe going for it, you do not know what is going to come next, and it is fun to speculate what will happen. Unfortunately, the big reveal, which usually happens in the third act in a Shyamalan film, happens sooner, and the picture just loses steam and its stretches itself out much farther than it needs to. The strain really starts to show, and it feels like that of a chore to finish.

I think if there was one more rewrite it would have been all for the better, but apparently the draft they went with was okay enough to start recording on the cameras.

Though the premise wasn't anything particularly new to me, as someone who is fond of science fiction, the trailers looked interesting enough to a degree, I do not mind the writer/director, and I really like both the leads John Cho and Katherine Waterston. Blumhouse as a production company has a very hit-and-miss track record though, sometimes they score high while other times they miss by a wide margin, AfrAId is yet another of their misfires.

The characters have the potential to be interesting and engaging, but each one feels like a rough sketch of an idea who to fill up the cast with. It is made worse when just about everyone in the cast minus Havana Rose Liu and David Dastmalchian are delivering their lines in such a way that it feels like either the last table read before filming or the first take of a scene.

The story moves much too fast to get really immersed into the series of events and doesn't allow enough breathing room to really think about the general idea of artificial intelligence and where things could go if not handled properly.

Blumhouse needs to really reconsider their production practices, it feels like they will be greenlit just about anything without any sort of hesitation.