In Review: 'Trap,' 'Kneecap'

This week's notable new releases—a cat-and-mouse thriller and Irish hip-hop biopic—have little in common beyond one-word rhyming titles and music concerts.

Trap
Dir. M. Night Shyamalan
105 min.

Why would anyone want to live in Philadelphia? Not the real city, of course, a place of historic landmarks, classic soul music, Cheez Whiz-based culinary delights, and playoff-bound sports teams. I mean the Philadelphia of M. Night Shyamalan’s movies. There you’ll find disturbed parents in the grips of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, supergenius-level baddies, and serial killers with multiple personalities—with only a superhero who can be defeated by the most common substance on earth standing in their way. Even the outlying areas aren’t safe, filled as they are with malevolent E.T.s, evil grandparents, and 19th century-obsessed weirdos. U.S. News and World Report currently lists the City of Brotherly Love 99th on its list of the Best Places to Live in the U.S. Surely the Shyamalan version would rank near the bottom.

Add to that list of Philly threats The Butcher, a serial killer who’s earned his name by slicing his victims into what one observer describes as deli-friendly selections. The Butcher seems like the sort of menace a nice fortysomething dad like Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett) ought to fear, particularly as father to Riley (Ariel Donoghue), a bubbly teen who, as the film opens, couldn’t be more excited about going to a concert, the local stop on pop sensation Lady Raven’s (Saleka Shyamalan) world tour. But there’s a twist (of course): Cooper is the Butcher and law enforcement, after learning he planned to attend the show, has turned it into a massive sting operation designed to take him down.

This doesn’t really count as a spoiler since every ad for Trap has given away its premise, which Shyamalan reveals early in the film. The good news: the early scenes of Cooper trying to outwit the brilliant FBI profiler Dr. Grant (Hayley Mills!) at the show are reasonably compelling and Hartnett is creepily convincing as a seemingly nice guy using his charm to hatch an escape plan. Shyamalan’s style has evolved from elegant to in-your-face (often literally given the many close-ups of characters delivering dialogue while looking just to the side of the camera) but it’s never boring. What’s more, the ads hide the fact that much of the movie takes place after the concert ends. The bad news: the rest of Trap, and there’s a lot, is really stupid.

Any film requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief, but Trap keeps pushing viewers’ limits on this front, starting with a daytime concert filled with lengthy intermissions in which attendees spend the break milling about the arena. (Does Shyamalan know how concerts work?) That’s forgivable enough, but the longer Trap lasts, the dumber its characters start to look. What’s worse, the more Shyamalan reveals about Cooper’s M.O. and tortured psychology, the less sense the character makes and the weaker Hartnett’s performance becomes. On the plus side, the original songs performed by Saneka Shyamalan (the director’s daughter, who records under the name Saneka) aren’t bad. But will anyone go to a Lady Raven concert after this disaster? After the events of Trap, she’ll be the Philadelphia of vaguely Taylor Swift-inspired fictional rock stars! —Keith Phipps

Trap is now playing everywhere.

Kneecap
Dir. Rich Peppiatt
105 min.

Hailing from the hardscrabble neighborhoods of West Belfast, the hip-hop trio Kneecap broke onto the scene in 2017 with “C.E.A.R.T.A.,” a track that embodies the political dilemma of a group that could be called imperfect vessels for Celtic identity were they inclined to be vessels at all. The sons of I.R.A. members, they rap mostly in the Irish language, which serves the dual purpose of sustaining the island’s indigenous tongue for a new generation and sounding really cool on the mic. The word “CEARTA” is Irish for “rights,” but the translated lyrics also drift into their hearty appetite for cocaine (“No doubt, I’m excited to be getting down on the powder again and again”) and ketamine (“And I bought a big bag of Ket instead of paying my rent”). Their young audience might love it, but there are passages in there to discomfort Irish republicans who may not want juvenile, drug-crazy miscreants on the team. 

The lively new biopic Kneecap, starring the irresistible trio as themselves, is a canny bit of self-mythology, framing their rise to fame as a ramshackle, episodic adventure that shares more than a little in common with Trainspotting. Yet it’s much more ingratiating than dangerous, which owes either to a lack of political will on the part of the band and the film’s British writer-director, Rich Peppiatt, or to the genuine spirit of rapscallions who prefer a more playful approach. After all, here’s a film that opens with one of the boys narrating over the explosive footage viewers expect to see of Northern Ireland and the Troubles, only to pull back and pivot in a different direction. There’s still a war to be fought, no doubt, but the members of Kneecap want to wage it on their impish, irreverent terms. 

The MCs here are Naoise (Naoise O Caireallain) and Liam Og (Liam Og O Hannaidh), low-level drug dealers with rap aspirations. When Liam refuses to speak English to the police after an arrest, JJ (JJ O Dochartaigh), a high-school Irish teacher, is brought in as his interpreter. As it happens, JJ has the skills to be a DJ and he’s attracted to this young, rowdy duo, despite the obvious threat to his more buttoned-down professional life. The MCs rap under the names Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap while JJ calls himself D.J. Próvaí, a reference to the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and masks himself in a balaclava with colors of the Irish flag. Kneecap gets off to extremely humble beginnings, conning themselves into a set in a bar scattered with old drunks, but it isn’t long before their music—and the controversy around it—brings wider attention. 

Whenever Kneecap sticks to the knockabout antics of the trio, it’s tremendous fun, buoyed by the petty (and not-so-petty) conflicts between them and their determination to resist external pressure and remain true to who they are. The film is significantly less sure-footed, however, when it brings in Michael Fassbender as Naoise’s father, a radical who disappeared into the underground after faking his own death, or a republican anti-drug goon who threatens the crew. They feel like stock characters infiltrating a film that wants to imagine itself as more unconventional and rebellious. Whenever they’re not merrily screwing around, the boys of Kneecap are wriggling within the ill-fitting, off-the-rack biopic Peppiatt has tailored for them. — Scott Tobias

Kneecap opens in limited release today.