Review: 'Trap' is a thriller that melds director M. Night Shyamalan's talent for suspense with his more unfortunate indulgences

When the potboiler “Trap” is really cooking, it reminds you of how talented a craftsman writer-director M. Night Shyamalan can be as he builds up suspense — and it makes the moments where Shyamalan indulges in his more annoying impulses more apparent.

The first hour or so of this thriller all happens in one building: A Philadelphia arena, where a superstar pop singer is performing for 20,000 adoring fans, the vast majority of them teen girls and their moms. There are about 3,000 men in attendance, we’re told at one point — and one of them is Cooper (Josh Hartnett), a firefighter who bought tickets as a treat for his 13-year-old daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), for a good report card.

Shyamalan follows Cooper and Riley as they arrive at the arena, catch a glimpse of the pop star, Lady Raven (played by the singer Saleka — aka Saleka Night Shyamalan, the filmmaker’s daughter, who wrote or co-wrote the songs she performs in the concert), entering the venue, and go inside themselves to take their seats at floor level. Cooper can’t help but notice the high security at the arena with cops at every exit.

A few minutes in, Cooper leaves Riley at their seats to go use the bathroom, which is where the movie takes a dark turn. Alone, Cooper looks at his phone, which shows him a closed-circuit camera view of the young man (Mark Bacolcol), chained up in a basement somewhere.

Shyamalan’s script feeds us the necessary supporting information (I’m not divulging anything that’s not in the trailer here) that there’s a serial killer on the loose, called The Butcher, and the concert has been organized as a trap to catch him. And there’s no doubt that Cooper is the guy the cops and a veteran FBI profiler (played by the one-time Disney star Hayley Mills, now 78 years old) are trying to catch, and that neither Riley nor his wife, Rachel (Alison Pill), suspect a thing.

The bulk of the story shows how Cooper has to size up the profiler’s tactics quickly to find an escape route, and listen for any bit of information the police drop that he can use. One of the movie’s weaknesses is that Shyamalan makes the cops and others — like a merch-table vendor (Jonathan Langdon) — too conveniently chatty about important security details.

The other weakness is placing too much of the plot responsibilities, particularly in the second half, on Lady Raven — and trusting the role to Saleka, in the most unfortunate instance of a director casting his own daughter since Sofia Coppola was in “The Godfather Part III.” Saleka’s Lady Raven is fine when she’s onstage, approximating what one might see at, say, an Olivia Rodrigo concert, but when the setting and the stakes abruptly change, Saluki doesn’t handle the shift as well as is needed.

With Hartnett’s high-wire acting, though, Shyamalan gets further on his outlandish premise than he probably deserves. Playing a menacing schemer under the guise of a goofy dad, Hartnett gives a calibrated performance that’s responsible for most of the creepy vibe Shyamalan aims to create and most of the thrillers that “Trap” delivers.

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‘Trap’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 2, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some violent content and brief strong language. Running time: 105 minutes.