Written and Directed by M. Night Shyamalan | 105 min | ▲▲△△△

It’s been a big year for the Shyamalans of Philadelphia. Ishana Shyamalan directed her first feature, The Watchers, while father M. Night and sister Salenka were busy on Trap.

M. Night remains one of Hollywood’s most prolific and successful genre filmmakers, having directed four features in the past five years — Knock At The Cabin, Old, and Glass before Trap— though none close to his best work. Trap is probably most akin to Split, his chilling and entertaining Dissociative Identity Disorder thriller, providing fantastic roles for James McAvoy and Anya Taylor-Joy — this one does something similar for Josh Hartnett, giving him a particularly challenging part to play.

That’s not to say that Trap is good, because it isn’t. The thriller is crushed by contrivance after implausibility, but the performances are solid — including Toronto and Hamilton standing in for Philadelphia.

Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is a loving Dad taking his tween daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert by pop star Lady Raven (Salenka, both actor and singer). The exteriors featured early in the film were shot at the Rogers Centre aka Skydome in Toronto, the interiors inside FirstOntario Centre aka Copps Coliseum in Hamilton.

What might have been the Shyamalan twist in another of his movies is revealed early on here (and in the marketing): Cooper is a serial killer known as The Butcher who dismembers his victims. Too bad, really, this could’ve had a Kevin Costner in No Way Out vibe with a couple of alterations to the script. One might wonder, idly, how many serial killers are also managing to hold down a job (he’s a firefighter) and take care of a family (including a younger son and wife, played by Alison Pill) without anyone suspecting he’s a nasty piece of work. But, let’s give it a chance.

The venue is lousy with security, which has Cooper nervous. He discovers they’re here to capture him — somehow they know he’s somewhere in this arena and they’re planning to interrogate every man in the place. This while he’s got a guy locked up in a basement — he can watch him on his phone, chained up.

So far, so reasonable: It’s a particularly Hitchockian or DePalmaesque set-up, which on paper should generate a fair amount of suspense. I was expecting Cooper to kill a few people in order to secure his freedom while having to keeping Riley in the dark, or have to use his deadly cunning to get out of a whole lot of tight spots. There are a few of the latter, but surprisingly Shyamalan fails to engineer a lot of genuine excitement from this scenario. He puts Hartnett front-and-centre in teddy-bear mode, which makes for a compelling schism between the thoughtful Dad and the bloodthirsty killer, but then he doesn’t do a whole lot with it.

Cooper figuring out how to get out of the trap — primarily avoiding a character played by the legendary Hayley Mills who found fame in The Parent Trap, is that a joke? — dominates the first two acts. The nature of the escape is pretty eye-rolling and it has something to do with Lady Raven, herself. Then, in that last act, she’s required to do something almost completely unbelievable, and Cooper, having slipped one snare, ends up slipping a couple more with almost supernatural ease.

All this allows a pretty great scene for Hartnett, now on a genuine comeback, and Alison Pill, but a whole mommy-issue subplot for Cooper and a lot of other nonsense in the final few minutes sours the entire affair. The film also disappoints by doing a good job settling up the key relationship — between father and daughter — and then completely abandoning it as an emotional hook. The key betrayal happens offscreen — we just get to hear it through a closed door from the perspective of a supporting character. From that point on, you may feel trapped in the cinema waiting for this thing to end.

Trap cleaves to the more frustrating elements of Shyamalan’s filmography — a dynamite premise and promising set-up gets dodgy through the midsection only to collapse in the homestretch. Some days it’s hard to believe this is the guy who gave us The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, or even Signs and The Lady In The Water — I might’ve been the one critic who liked that one — but we live in hope he’ll deliver that kind of quality again. Trap isn’t it.