M. Night Shyamalan | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

The M. Night Shyamalan trend since “The Sixth Sense” (1999) and “Unbreakable” (2000) were released as great movies continue. After hitting his peak with these two movies from 25 years ago, Shyamalan has continued to make mediocre or bad movies ever since. His latest release “Trap” is not only a bad movie, it is amazingly stupid – and could be ranked as the dumbest movie ever made.

The main premise of “Trap” is probably inspired from the success of the recent and hugely popular Taylor Swift world tour, about a serial killer known as “The Butcher”, played by Josh Hartnett who is at a concert of a major female singing star with his daughter and the police know he is at this concert – so they set some kind of undefined trap to catch him. What follows is a series of stupid events, that make no sense. Towards the end of this disaster is a meeting between Cooper, played by Hartnett, and the singer Lady Raven, played by Saleka Shyamalan, the daughter of M. Night Shyamalan – where Raven is by herself talking to Cooper within an isle in this huge stadium and later in a separate room and inexplicably Raven’s entire security team is nowhere to be found. This is the star of a huge concert with over 20 thousand fans and her security team is not anywhere near her. How could such a glaring and obvious error get past the writer and director of this bad movie? What is Shyamalan thinking?

Cooper and Raven eventually wind up at his house with his wife and 2 kids and once again, her security team is nowhere around them. I could not believe that a director and screenwriter who once was as great as Shyamalan could fall this far. The level of illogical stupidity of this story is extremely hard to understand.

It was also hard to understand why Josh Harnett who is attempting a comeback as a movie actor would choose a movie this bad to make his return to movie acting. Hopefully, Hartnett can recover from this bad mistake.

The Rotten Tomatoes critics are way too high 48% with my rating of 10% and a run for your life miss this horrendous and very stupid mess of a film.

If any aspiring screenwriter, no matter how desperate to break into the movie industry (even if they were connected to some agency) were to submit the script for “Knock at the Cabin”, the reason for the rejections would be the same. “This idea is just too off the wall, too crazy, and does not make sense”.

There is a family of two gay men and one very cute Chinese girl, named Wen, played by Kristen Cui who is about 6 years old. Four people break into their cabin and insist that there is a series of events that are going to end all life on planet earth – unless one of the 3 people in this family agrees to sacrifice themselves to save the world. As this idea drags on, each one of the 4 people who invade the cabin agrees to have themselves killed with an ax after they put a white hood over their heads. What? Why is this necessary that these people who break into the house also must kill themselves? How does having one of the 3 people in the cabin agree to die going to prevent the apocalypse? Can this story give more detail, be more specific? Make some sense?

Apparently, the 4 people who break into the cabin have seen visions of earthquakes, tsunamis, and even airplanes falling out of the sky and now all of this is happening in real-time. But no explanation is given as to how or why human sacrifice is going to prevent the end of the world. How can a glaring hole this big exist in an M. Night Shyamalan movie? There are a series of televised news stories that are shown to the 3 people in the cabin, to prove to them that the end of the world is coming. But why not also explain to them, how exactly might their human sacrifice save the world? What did their premonitions tell them about this most important part of the story?

This movie stars mostly unknown actors with the main character, former pro wrestler Dave Bautista, playing the leader of the group that break into the cabin. I thought the acting was mostly very good by everyone, but the story is so absurd they all must have had a hard time not laughing during their scenes.

Once again M. Night Shyamalan is trying to break new ground, create something different, and achieve that high note he did with “The Sixth Sense”, released in 1999. The Sixth Sense is not only one of the greatest movies of all time but also one of the all-time most perfect endings of any movie ever released. Like the previous Shyamalan film “Old”, released in 2021 – this will be considered another not-so-good film, with Rotten Tomatoes ratings at a below-average 67%, that this time around, I do agree with.