Trap ★★☆☆☆

I first saw this trailer right after seeing the Late Night with the Devil one, and I was extremely impressed. For those who haven't seen the trailer at all I recommend doing so before reading this, but when they chose to reveal a major twist in the trailer itself, it led me to believe there was going to be a bigger one in the film since that's a something M. Night Shyamalan does. Unfortunately, most of my hopes for this movie did not come through as many of these things did not happen. The story follows a man named Cooper who takes his daughter to a concert, and what Cooper learns slowly is that the entire concert is a trap intended to catch the serial killer known as The Butcher. As revealed in the trailer (so semi-spoiler warning ahead for those who haven't seen it) Cooper is The Butcher, and he now has to try and sneak out of the concert before the police close in on him. I will say, I expected so much more from this film. Within five minutes the dialogue was pretty bad and cliche, and every line felt forced and scripted for most of the main characters. The actor of the daughter was really bad, and it felt like she had a teleprompter in front of her the whole time. I will say the reason this movie was two stars and not even one star was due to the Josh Hartnett's performance and some cinematography. He was the only good actor throughout the entire film (despite him being handed some pretty bad dialogue for some parts) and he did sell the pyschotic character well, and it's not his fault that the movie was poorly written. Another positive was some cinematography, as a lot of the concert shots looked pretty cool and there were some creative angles throghout. For more noticeable cons, the pacing of the film was off and felt divided. The concert scenes were paced fine and had a good mix of sneaking around and concert shots which was entertaining enough. However the last half of the film went completely crazy (and not in a good way). For some reason a bunch of random events kept happening as the pacing got increasingly fast and I was not comprehending how certain actions kept happening. Then for the last 15 minutes it felt really slow and the ending was dragged out for way too long. I will admit I expected a lot more from M. Night Shyamalan since I am a huge fan of Unbreakable, Split, The Sixth Sense, and even The Village, but this one was not it. Overall, I don't recommend this film to anyone (not even fans of the director) and I think this is a stream-at-home movie that's not worth the money.