Trap is the newest movie from the master of twists M. Night Shyamalan.

Trap isn’t his worst movie, but it’s far from his best. A strange note to start this off: Warner Bros seemingly never lifted the embargo on Trap. As reported by World of Reel, Warner Bros refused to screen the film for critics, and when World of Reel reached out for their embargo date, Warner never gave a straight answer. The film’s official release date is 8/2, but at the time of this writing the film is already out in the world by way of Thursday previews. I mention this just because when a film, video game, or any piece of art gets an embargo date incredibly close or even after audiences are able to spend money on it, that’s usually a bad sign.

Keeping that in mind, Trap isn’t an atrocious over-hyped mess. The movie is incredibly mid and while there aren’t a lot of other reviews out in the wild for me to compare, I have a feeling that’s going to be the critic’s general consensus. Trap is fine. It’s a PG-13 summer thriller that is very constrained with a much more straightforward plot than you might think.

After M. Night’s last film Knock at the Cabin, one of his best films in years with a truly great twist at the end, I really thought Trap was going to knock it out of the park. It doesn’t, and that’s a real shame. Without any spoilers, the plot of Trap is shockingly straightforward for an M. Night Shyamalan film. Josh Hartnett plays Cooper Adams, a loving father and closeted serial killer, who finds himself at a concert with his daughter. Soon after arriving at the concert, Cooper realizes the place is crawling with police, all looking for him. What follows is two hours of a cat-and-mouse game with Cooper using his wit and cunning to evade the FBI.

There is a lot of greatness in Trap, specifically in Night’s directing and cinematography. In Trap, M. Night uses a lot of long lenses and close-ups with the subject firmly framed in the center. This gives the whole film a sense of being “trapped.” The setting for most of the film is a crowded, chaotic teen concert. By narrowing the shots in on Josh Hartnett, the whole concert, this grand production, starts to feel small. We feel trapped in Josh Hartnett, convinced we are going to get caught as Hartnett and the FBI keep trying to stay one step ahead of each other. M. Night’s daughter Saleka plays Lady Raven, the concert for whom Hartnett and his daughter attend, and the music she composed for the film is also quite good along with her performance.

Trap feels like a film made by Shyamalan for his daughters. If that sentiment gives you PTSD over Lady in the Water it shouldn’t. Trap is much more watchable and easier to follow than some of his previous flops. Throughout Trap, we get these hints of tenderness. One could imagine M. Night drawing from his own parallels of taking his kids to concerts. His daughter certainly had love for it as she now has a career as a singer and songwriter. Watching Josh Hartnett interact with his daughter feels like any dad relishing in the fact that he’s able to bring his child joy. A teenage child at that. Hartnett endearingly interacts with his daughter, looking at the smile on her face as she watches her favorite pop star, all while trying to devise a plan to avoid getting caught for murder.

This is what leads to some of the major problems with the film. Josh Hartnett’s performance never quite feels right. I was stoked when I saw he was cast in this film. His appearance in the latest season of Black Mirror was flawless and I was convinced this was going to be his big comeback. The moments where Hartnett is intense are great. He can turn on a dime and be this creepy stoic figure but the moments where he’s lying and playing the nice guy all come off as ham-fisted. He gives the sort of “aww shucks” performance whenever he’s trying to be the nice guy and it all feels unbelievable. There’s a scene where Allison Pill, the true show stealer of the film, is talking to Hartnett, telling him how good he is at lying, how no one would ever know he wasn’t genuinely a great guy and I thought to myself “are we watching the same guy?” The film also doesn’t rely on a big mystery, the plot is pretty straightforward, but it still manages to sneak in a painfully long exposition dump at the end full of tidbits we could have incurred from our viewing of the film.

M. Night Shyamalan is at his best when he puts a small group of people into an even smaller set with a giant mystery hanging over their heads. He did this exceptionally well with The Visit, Knock at the Cabin, and Devil, a criminally underrated film that he wrote but didn’t direct. Trap is almost the opposite script. There is a small cast, but the setting is a huge concert with thousands of attendees and there is no mystery for the audience to hang on to. The film lays everything out right from the jump. All the characters and all the stakes. It’s a good story, a good idea for a narrative, but one that feels better suited for a director like Michael Mann than M. Night Shyamalan.

Trap also has a few plot points that go nowhere and feel like incomplete scraps of a larger idea. There is a big subplot involving Cooper’s relationship with his mother and an FBI profiler who has analyzed his cases enough to know every detail about his life. It’s well-tread material that’s never fleshed out and combined with the film’s firm PG-13 aesthetic, makes it feel like we’re watching an episode of Law and Order instead of a big summer blockbuster. My guess is that these plot points played a much larger role in the script but were ultimately left on the cutting room floor. That’s mere conjecture though. I don’t truly know, the plot beats just feel so incomplete that I have to imagine that the studio asked him to trim down these narratives.

Trap is not a bad movie but it’s not one that I think is worth your time. It will inevitably come to Netflix or Hulu and have a great second life there. I’m not sure how it will do at the box office with the weird embargo rules and the film being released a week after Deadpool & Wolverine but the name M. Night Shyamalan still carries a lot of weight. And Josh Hartnett taps into some early 2000s nostalgia that the world seems to be clamoring for. Just look at the box office for Deadpool & Wolverine. Once it hits streaming, more eyes will get on this flick and it may get a reevaluation when it’s not competing with a host of truly great horror movies that have released this summer but for now, I’m giving the film a firm five. The trailer gets a 10 though.