Id and Idiocy

Over at his own newsletter, the writer and critic Corey Atad just finished a run through Clint Eastwood’s last decade and a half of cinema, looking for a common thread that might run through Hereafter to the current Juror #2. I won’t reveal his conclusions here, because Corey makes enough interesting arguments and observations that you should read the series yourself, but it made me wonder what other filmmakers might deserve a similar look.

Lo and behold, M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap came to disc this week, and if you were looking for another director with a distinct style and genre preference – well, here you are. And while he’s a long way from the end of his career, we can even define the current period in Shyamalan’s cinema as post-blockbuster, following in the wake of his giant studio bombs The Last Airbender and After Earth. Split and Glass make this argument a little difficult, but you see where I’m going, right?

For the most part, Shyamalan has been working at a more modest scale, self-financing his projects and keeping the stories small. The Visit, Old, Knock at the Cabin and even Split and Glass are set in a single location for the most part, their characters forced to deal with impossible challenges in a compressed window of time. They’re also defined by Shyamalan’s conviction that he is the smartest and most clever person who ever opened Final Draft and a brilliant writer of dialogue, which presents a different challenge to those of us in the audience.

Trap is perhaps the greatest challenge of all, a high-concept thriller that establishes a pretty nifty premise and proceeds to hurl itself down every staircase it can find.

It starts so well! Cheerful Philadelphia fireman Cooper Abbott (Josh Hartnett) is taking his tween daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to an afternoon concert of her favorite singer, Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan), who we are meant to understand commands the same level of fame and admiration as Taylor Swift. But as they enter the stadium, Cooper notices a higher than usual level of armed police officers – and at least two SWAT teams.

Spidey-sense tingling, Cooper makes some friendly enquiries and soon learns the concert is operating with a hidden agenda: The authorities have reason to believe that the serial killer known as The Butcher is attending Lady Raven’s show, and so the stadium has been turned into, how do you say, an inescapable snare, a construction of surveillance with interlocking levels of security designed to catch this monster once and for all.

And this brings us to our quandary: Cooper is The Butcher. And now that he knows the walls are closing in on him, what will he do to ensure his escape?

It is, I admit, a pretty great idea – a film that locks us into the perspective of a crafty villain who also appears to be a caring, engaged father. Hartnett and Shyamalan quickly establish that Cooper genuinely loves his kid; The Butcher having a family isn’t some kind of elaborate cover. But he’s also a monster, a meticulous one who’s scattered a dozen dissected corpses all over town, and has his next victim chained up in an elaborate basement death trap somewhere. We know this because Cooper checks in on him via an app on his phone, just to watch him beg for his life.

Cooper does not wear headphones in this moment, letting the poor guy’s cries for help play through the phone speaker, which is the first sign that Trap is not going to be as airtight as its creator believes. Once again, M. Night Shyamalan has made a pretty dumb movie that imagines itself to be very smart – and honestly, those movies can be a lot of fun. But Trap just keeps piling on dumb choices and demanding we receive them as though its author is playing fourth-dimensional chess, and that is the opposite of fun.

Indeed, Trap winds up dragging us through a series of incidents that don’t just beggar belief but actively encourage disbelief, with Cooper leaving Riley in her seat over and over to scout possible exits, steal a security pass, mingle with police and even cause a diversion in order to check out a potential escape route, staying one step ahead of the assembled law enforcement while never quite figuring out his flight plan.

This first movement almost works, because Hartnett is giving a really interesting performance as Cooper, who gets people to trust him by projecting an almost demented version of friendliness; his scenes with a T-shirt vendor played by Run the Burbs’ Jonathan Langdon might not be intended as high comedy, but they’re genuinely funny in a good-natured sort of way.

But once Cooper hits on his escape strategy, which is both incredibly stupid and utterly unbelievable, the movie stumbles and never recovers. Saleka Night Shyamalan is pretty convincing as a pop singer, but she’s not a strong enough actor to pull off any of the dramatic scenes her dad has written for her, or to sell the mixture of confusion, horror and outrage Lady Raven experiences once she’s yanked into Cooper’s world.

I’ve said too much already, but it doesn’t really matter, because Trap just gets dumber and dumber from there, breaking the delicate bubble of the concert for a third act that takes the characters to another location for a sequence of events that’s somehow even less credible than the stuff that happens in the second act. Trap moves slowly, as all of Shyamalan’s movies do, but its pacing never feels deliberate or strategic; mostly it feels like Shyamalan doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, and is feeling his way through the script in real time.

I know that’s impossible, but that’s the vibe: The audience has become Shyamalan’s sounding board. “Is this working? How about this? What if I do this?” Just think about where Trap ends, and how its final shot is played as triumphant instead of pointless. It’s such a waste – a waste of time, a waste of money and a waste of talent – not just Hartnett’s and Donoghue’s but Alison Pill’s and Hayley Mills’ and Kid Cudi’s as well.

(Oh right, Kid Cudi is also in this, wearing a ridiculous wig as a horny rapper named Thinker because M. Night Shyamalan has absolutely no idea what the kids find cool these days. I remind you the hip-hop star in Old was called Mid-Size Sedan.)

It’s all very dumb and makes zero sense, and also has a scene where Shyamalan himself turns up to introduce himself as Lady Raven’s uncle and proceeds to explain what an uncle is to a grown-ass man. I’m probably making it sound like it’s worth watching anyway. Reader, it is not.

Warner’s 4K edition of Trap looks and sounds very good, for what that’s worth, and offers a pair of brief featurettes, “Setting the Trap: A New M. Night Shyamalan Experience” and “Saleka as Lady Raven”, which will not do much to counter the grumblings that Shyamalan pere made this movie in the hopes of boosting his kid’s music career. Three deleted scenes are also included (one of them, in which Cooper makes yet another narrow escape, at least lets him make eye contact with Mills’ relentless FBI profiler), along with an extended version of one of Lady Raven’s songs, which, see previous sentence.

You know what’s a much better movie about a white guy pretending he’s not a monster? Blink Twice.

I would even go so far as to call this a great movie about that very thing, since Zoë Kravitz’ tremendously assured first feature knows exactly what it’s doing from the first frame to the last. It’s the one movie I’ve seen that understands what Jordan Peele was doing in Get Out and builds on it, bringing Peele’s allegory of racial tension into the arena of gender politics while never once feeling like a polemic.

So there’s this disgraced billionaire, Slater King, who made a fortune in tech and was a god among men … until he had to step away from his empire due to some unspecified but apparently awful behavior. A year later, he’s doing the apology circuit and sponsoring awards and throwing parties at museums, and when New York cater-waiters Frida (Naomi Ackie) and Jess (Alia Shawkat) sneak into one of them, he charms them into flying out to his island for a little getaway with his pals and their very attractive dates.

Everything goes just wonderfully, with incredible meals and flirty conversation and drinks and drugs and partying and no one caring what day it is. Presumably there’s also a lot of sex going on, but the movie never addresses that. Possibly Slater is a perfect gentleman. Probably he isn’t. He owns a whole island, after all, and people who own islands tend to be pretty good at taking whatever they want. But Slater is played by Channing Tatum, and Channing Tatum … he’s a good guy, right?

One morning, Frida wakes up with dirt under her fingernails that she can’t explain. Another woman, Sarah (Hit Man's incredible Adria Arjona) – a sporty, capable type who’s been on a survival reality series for eight seasons – has a bruise on her arm she doesn’t remember acquiring. But whatever. Drinks and drugs, right? And then one morning Frida can’t find Jess, and no one even remembers she was there in the first place.

We’ve seen this movie before. But so have Kravitz and her co-writer E.T Feigenbaum, with whom she previously worked on the excellent High Fidelity reboot, and they want to do something different, turning Blink Twice into a movie about powerlessness and fortitude – about knowing you’re trapped in a roomful of malevolent gaslighters, and having to fight your way out with nothing but your wits and whatever heavy objects might be within reach.

It’s another illustration of Margaret Atwood’s line about men being afraid women will laugh at them and women being afraid that men will kill them – the same maxim that powers Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour – but in an entirely different context and mode. I suspect it’s no coincidence that both films are the work of young women who’ve spent their entire career in front of cameras and audiences, being scrutinized mercilessly by the entire planet.

I wouldn’t dream of discussing the film any further, except to say that each new complication of the plot is entirely credible, and the second half is very, very funny in a queasy, credible way. It’s beautifully photographed by Adam Newport-Berra, who shot the Young Obama biopic Barry and The Last Black Man in San Francisco), and perfectly cast right down to the smallest roles. It’s the kind of movie that keeps throwing curve balls while never feeling like it’s breaking faith with us, and it announces Kravitz as a director with a really interesting career ahead of her. It is the anti-Trap, really, and for a movie that goes as hard as it does – opening with a trigger warning, in fact – it’s also an awful lot of fun. Don’t watch the trailer, don’t look for a plot summary. Just watch it.

Regrettably, Blink Twice was an Amazon MGM release, and that means that Warner’s Blu-ray release has no special features – though it’s possible a special edition isn’t out of the question now that Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All, one of the very first titles Warner licensed from the studio, is getting a 4K upgrade from Shout! Studios later this month. I’d give almost anything for a Kravitz audio commentary for Blink Twice; I think this is one of the year’s best movies, and I’d love to know how it came to be.

Steven Kostanski’s Frankie Freako is a cautionary tale of a different sort, being the tale of Conor (Conor Sweeney), a deeply repressed office drone who needs to be shaken out of his rut. And when he calls a 1-900 number when his wife goes away for the weekend, a shaking is exactly what he gets – thanks to the arrival of Frankie Freako, the original party animal, and his party posse Dottie (a cowgirl) and Crunch (a cyborg).

Will these pint-sized party people help Connor reconnect with his fun-loving younger self, or will they destroy his house, his marriage and his life by trying? Also, where exactly do Frankie and his pals come from?

Frankie Freako is an unapologetic riff on the puppets-gone-wild movies of the ’80s and ’90s, made without a single wink to the audience; like Kostanski’s equally po-faced Psycho Goreman, it feels like it squeezed its way into our universe from an alternate dimension where Critters and The Cabbage Patch Kids Movie did more to define American pop cinema than E.T. and Back to the Future. Unlike Psycho Goreman, though, the violence is strictly cartoonish. Okay, there’s that one guy who gets melted, but it’s still pretty kid-friendly.

Kostanski and Sweeney play the whole thing straight, even as the plot gets sillier and more complicated, and the transgressiveness of Frankie and his squad is entirely PG-13. There’s a guilelessness to the whole thing that’s downright charming, and the edgiest idea in the picture is a subplot that finds Conor’s conniving boss Mr. Buechler (Adam Brooks, another member of the Astron-6 freako collective) cheerfully trying to make Conor a patsy for his embezzlement scheme at work, but that’s just there to set up Buechler’s very silly comeuppance.

And yes, the character is named for the late John Carl Buechler, the creature designer who gave us the Troll and Ghoulies movies. Because that’s the kind of guy Steven Kostanski is. You don’t make this movie if you just want to make fun of the movies you saw as a kid; you make this movie to remind people how truly weird it felt to stumble across those movies, and enjoy them in all their distinctive, handmade weirdness.

Shout’s Blu-ray is its own fun-time party package, with an audio commentary from Kostanski, Sweeney and director of photography Pierce Derks and two extremely tongue-in-cheek looks behind the scenes: “Fasten Your Freakbelts”, in which Sweeney offers a tour of the shoot in the style of a smarmy MTV VJ, and “Conor & Frankie”, a conversation between Sweeney and his puppet co-star that drifts pleasantly into very absurd territory. The disc also throws in the TV spot for Frankie’s party line, the complete footage of Conor’s beloved Antique Connoisseurs show (featuring Rob Schrab as host “Robe Delaney”) and the film’s theatrical trailer.

So there you are! Three films about the unchained male id, from very different perspectives. Betcha Juror #2 doesn’t have a single ghoulie in it.

Blink Twice and Frankie Freako are available on Blu-ray from Warner Home Entertainment and Shout! Studios, respectively; Trap is available in separate 4K and Blu-ray editions from Warner Home Entertainment.

Up next: A flood of 4K restorations from Arrow and Shout awaits us, along with the second volume of Severin’s folk-horror omnibus. See you soon.