the Butcher, a notorious serial killer. He even tells Cooper the password arena employees have been given to verify they can enter restricted areas. Of course, as everyone who has seen the movie’s trailer knows, Cooper is the Butcher. To show his mala fides, he keeps checking on his latest victim, who’s tied up in a basement somewhere. An FBI profiler (Hayley Mills in a rare recent appearance) informs the assembled cops and the audience that the Butcher is a calm sociopath who won’t rattle. And Cooper doesn’t, maintaining a cheerful, harmless appearance as he tries one scheme after another to leave the building.

Eventually, Cooper and his daughter leave the building. At this point, I checked my watch, thinking I had lost track of time and that the film would soon end in a hail of bullets or some similarly powerful display of law enforcement skill and might. My temporal sense was right; my script prognostication sense was not. Instead, Trap rambles on for another 45 minutes. And while Cooper’s method of escape from the arena fell barely within the boundaries of an audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief, the subsequent events did not. I won’t spoil them, except to note I was shaking my head on multiple occasions about plot developments that were never adequately explained and completely defied belief.

The worst shortcoming of M. Night Shyamalan’s script was his need to explain Cooper’s behavior. Since Alfred Hitchcock laid out Norman Bates’s psychosis in the ending scene of Psycho, screenwriters have felt the need to explain why their villains are so twisted. While Cooper is still inside the arena, Shyamalan’s attempts at exposition are limited to Cooper’s seeing his dead mother in the crowd. But once outside, we get a lengthy discourse on his need to keep the psychotic and normal sides of his personality separate. The explanation distracts from Josh Hartnett’s performance and slows the movie down. This taut pace of the film’s first half disappears, with unnecessary explanations, mini-twists that don’t surprise, and escapes that don’t hold up to the slightest scrutiny. The result was a film that felt padded to achieve feature length.

The one saving grace through this meandering second half is Josh Hartnett. Cooper Adams is patterned on Ted Bundy, an outwardly likable sociopath who has evaded detection for years. (The movie explains how Cooper can stash away his victims, like the man in the basement.) Only when the camera closes in on Hartnett’s face do we see everything isn’t quite well inside. It’s a subtle performance (with a few creepy moments) and Hartnett’s best work in years.

Trap also marks Saleka Shyamalan’s acting debut. She’s a pop singer, and her understandably supportive father gives her performances lots of soundtrack time in the movie. The elder Shyamalan is smart enough to avoid turning the film into a concert video, so the singer is only audible in the background as Cooper moves around the arena or talks to his daughter and others. The elder Shyamalan also has a crucial cameo as Lady Raven’s uncle, who helps manage the crowd in the floor seat area where Cooper and his daughter are. I was surprised that Saleka has a role that requires her to act rather than perform on stage. She’s not a brilliant actress, but she’s not an embarrassment either. Singer Kid Cudi (billed as Scott Mescudi) also has an entertaining cameo as another concert performer.

Trap reminded me of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s “Sudden Death,” perhaps his best movie, in which he plays an average guy trying to foil a Die Hard-like ransom scheme in a crowded hockey arena. That movie had its share of unbelievable moments (including a scene in which Van Damme takes the ice and enters the game dressed as a team’s backup goalie). However, director Peter Hyams knew that the action had to stay in a confined space for his film to work. M. Night Shyamalan, despite all his skill at staging suspenseful moments in the movie’s first half, loses track of that premise, and the second half of Trap suffers.

If Shyamalan had made a more focused movie, Trap could have been a great suspense thriller with a unique point-of-view reversal. Staging the film from Cooper’s point-of-view puts the audience in the unsettling situation of finding themselves drawn to root for a character who slaughters people he keeps chained in a basement. Unfortunately, the second half of Trap is mediocre at a direct-to-video level. However, Josh Hartnett’s performance never wavers, and he’ll be remembered as a great thriller villain for years. On the strength of that performance and its solid first half, I’m recommending Trap for suspense thriller fans.