105 min | PG-13 | August 2, 2024 | Warner Bros. Pictures
M. Night Shyamalan makes a thriller about a serial killer trapped at a pop concert with his daughter. Josh Hartnett is genuinely great. The film around him is genuinely Shyamalan.
Cooper is a firefighter and devoted father who takes his teenage daughter Riley to a pop concert. He is also a serial killer called the Butcher. The concert is a trap designed by the FBI to catch him. Cooper must escape while maintaining the illusion of being a normal dad. The premise is Hitchcockian and Shyamalan commits to the cat-and-mouse structure with more discipline than his recent work. The first half is tense and inventive. The second half is not.
Josh Hartnett plays Cooper with a performance that is the film’s best asset. He shifts between warm, goofy dad and cold, calculating predator with a fluidity that is unsettling. The smile is too wide. The helpfulness is too eager. Hartnett finds the specific way a psychopath performs normalcy and makes it both charming and repulsive. Ariel Donoghue plays Riley with teenage enthusiasm that is painful because she does not know who her father is. Saleka Night Shyamalan, the director’s daughter, plays the pop star Lady Raven and performs her own songs. She is fine.
Shyamalan shoots the concert with a handheld intimacy that puts you in the crowd. The arena setting creates natural claustrophobia. The security checkpoints become obstacles that Cooper navigates with improvised cunning. The tension in the first half works because the rules are clear. Man must escape building. Building is designed to catch him. Then the film leaves the arena and the rules dissolve. The second half introduces plot developments that strain credibility past the breaking point. Shyamalan cannot resist overcomplicating what should remain simple.
The film needed to stay in the arena. The concert setting was the trap and the trap was the movie. When Shyamalan opens it up, the air escapes and the tension deflates. Hartnett deserves a better film around his performance. He gives Cooper a humanity that makes the character fascinating and the film wastes it on twists that diminish rather than deepen.