The way I see it, you take a chance whenever you head out to see an M Night Shymalan movie. While he will occasionally deliver a solid movie, often of a B-movie sort, his hit-to-miss ratio isn’t good. Many of his movies are, to put it bluntly, somewhat ridiculous at best. His characters speak lines that don’t even sound like something anyone has ever said in their lives, at least not in English. He really needs to cast the right actors, and I’ve seen many talented actors flounder in his movies.
So, would Josh Hartnett be the sort who can make Shyamalan’s words sound like actual human speech and behavior? There was only one way for me to find out.
Dorky suburban dad Cooper (Hartnett) is taking his teenage daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to see big time pop star Lady Raven (Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka, who also wrote the original songs for the movie). Everything is going well at first, but Cooper notices a pretty heavy police presence. A chatty T-shirt vendor soon tells Cooper everything he needs to know: the infamous serial killer the Butcher is apparently at the concert, the police know it, and they set a trap for him. There’s even a famous profiler (Hayley Mills) on hand to lead things. However, there’s a problem for law enforcement: Cooper is the Butcher, and now he knows all about the trap.
What follows is Cooper’s doing everything he can to avoid arrest, all without alerting Riley, who has no idea her dad is a serial killer. Cooper finds numerous advantages and tricks that can keep the cops at bay, but the odds would seem to be stacked against him. He’s an observant fellow, though, and he seems to understand that acting like you belong somewhere is sometimes the best cover. Besides, he already has his next victim tied up somewhere, waiting to die. Will he manage to escape?
Alright, first things first: Harnett is fine. I’ve seen better performances in Shyamalan movies, but he has the right balance of blandly dorky but occasionally kinda off. He’s not best I’ve seen in a Shyamalan movie, but he’s far from the worst. If the best performances came from the likes of Bruce Willis (in his prime), Samuel L Jackson, James McAvoy, and Dave Bautista, he’s not quite in their league, but he’s far ahead of, say, the entire cast of Old. I’d say he’s probably about on par with Anya Taylor-Joy, who was fine but didn’t have a particularly memorable character. Additionally, Lady Raven’s songs actually sound like something that a popular singer would produce. I could believe she was something on par with Taylor Swift or someone along those lines here. Plus, she has a better singer name than Old‘s rapper named Mid-Size Sedan.
But those are the pluses, so how about the minuses? As always, Shyamalan is a pretty talented director. He can create some genuine tension at times that kept me if not on the edge of my seat, then at least close to it. The problem here is as good a director as Shyamalan can be, he’s not a good writer. Cooper manages to evade law enforcement less by being smart than by the fact everyone else seems kinda stupid. It doesn’t make for good cat-and-mouse tactics if the people Cooper is evading keep making stupid mistakes, starting with the chatty T-shirt vendor who alerts Cooper to the trap in the first place. That might be fine except in the last act, Shyamalan’s script decides to change protagonists. Cooper is for the first hour or so of the movie the main point of view, but that changes after a while just as he’s starting to act particularly sinister. From there, I just thought the movie didn’t know when to stop. There were multiple moments that, theoretically, could have been the end of the movie, but it just kept going somehow. I found the movie just got tiresome after a while, where I am guessing what were meant to be cool reveals were just things that made me wonder if the movie was ever gonna end. Yeah, this was just another bust of a Shyamalan movie.
But hey, the songs were kinda nice, I suppose.
Grade: D
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