A teen horror slasher, a coming-of-age dramedy, a low-budget crime drama and an M. Night Shyamalan movie. A lot of variety this week.

Trap

NON-SPOILERS: I’ll always give an M. Night Shyamalan joint the time of day. No matter how low the Tomato score, or how awful co-workers say it is, or even if I hear it’s just a giant vanity project to advertise his daughter’s pop music career. And, let’s be frank, Trap is really just an 105-minute commercial for his daughter’s performance abilities, shakily built around a 25-minute Twilight Zone plot. And not just because there’s extended sequences of Saleka performing…but I can’t talk about that in the non-spoiler section. Tell you what? Here’s what I’ll reveal if you haven’t seen the movie but plan to – it’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen, but unlike another stupid thriller I saw this week, it’s legitimately engaging and entertaining almost throughout its whole runtime. Even if the whole time you’re thinking, “Fuck, this is stupid! How is this getting stupider?” I’m just gonna word vomit this review…

SPOILERS: Josh Harnett delivers perhaps the least believable serial killer performance I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s just a sweetheart even in his darkest moments and I don’t buy it for a second. When he’s not killing people, he’s a real family man, and one night he takes his young daughter (Ariel Donoghue – the only believable performance in the film) to a Lady Raven concert, which is like this universe’s Taylor Swift or maybe not. I don’t know much about pop music, you tell me. Anyway, Lady Raven is played by M. Night Shyamalan‘s daughter, Seleka. She’s pretty good as a pop star, I guess. Her music is nothing I’d ever vibe to, but it’s not cloyingly bad or obnoxious either. Anyway, Hartnett finds out that the FBI has the concert surrounded and is going to catch the white guy they believe to be The Butcher. That’s right, that’s the nickname of his serial killer. The Butcher. It’s so uninspired and basic, I actually chortled.

Hartnett finds out the Feds are looking for him from this t-shirt vendor who is wildly unprofessional at his job. This fucking guy is taking Josh backstage to restricted areas, just cause he gets a good vibe off of him. Of course, the butcher couldn’t be this tall white guy who totally fits the description, so let’s give him access to all these areas. Eventually, Hartnett gets his hands on a police walkie talkie with an ear piece, so he can always stay one step ahead of them. However, leading the FBI is a celebrated criminal psychologist and serial killer expert, Dr. Josephine Grant, played by Hayley Mills of OG Parent Trap and Pollyanna fame. Lohan was better, but whateves. Anyway, it makes zero sense that this psychologist has taken full control of the mission and is ordering these feds around but that’s the world M. Night has created where his daughter is Beyonce. This adds tremendous pressure to Hartnett who then manages to get backstage by telling Lady Raven’s manager/uncle (played by her actual father, M. Night) that his daughter is a leukemia survivor (a lie) because he knows it will make the uncle feel feels and put his daughter in the show for the audience member participation number because you know…child cancer and Make a Wish Foundation. Right?

Anyway, this gets Hartnett one step closer to being backstage, where hopefully he can chart his exit. He’s now on the side of the stage, cheering on his shy daughter to perform with her idol. It’s a tender moment I’m not so sure a serial murderer could legitimately experience like Josh Hartnett does. Anyway, she performs, the concert ends, and they end up backstage. Unfortunately, Lady Raven’s tour manager or assistant or something tells him that police are checking every person backstage and only the select few in Lady Raven’s limousine will be exempt. This prompts Hartnett into action as he takes Lady Raven aside under the guise of thanking her for doing something special for his daughter, but then reveals himself to be the butcher. He tells Lady Raven that him and his daughter and only them will be riding in her limo and if she does anything to fuck with him, he’ll murder the guy he has chained up in a basement somewhere cause he also has this contraption that will release lethal levels of carbon monoxide if Hartnett presses a button on his Android phone. Wanting to be a humanitarian, Lady Raven agrees and gives them a ride.

Kid Cudi has a cameo as a high-maintenance pop star sporting a chub for Hartnett. He’s really entertaining.

Once in the limo, Hartnett asks to be dropped off but Lady Raven becomes the hero/final girl of the story and insists the limo driver take him to his house. Hartnett doesn’t want to reveal where he lives but his daughter blurts it out, and it’s game time. Lady Raven or him aren’t leaving the house alive. Lady Raven has dinner with Hartnett, his daughter, his wife and his son. It’s awkward for many reasons but eventually Lady Raven takes off to the bathroom with Hartnett‘s phone and Hartnett goes berserk and basically reveals he’s a serial killer to his family. A huge struggle ensues, the cops come to arrest Hartnett, but Hartnett sneaks away through a special tunnel in his hallway closet, and ends up confiscating Lady Raven’s limo, with Lady Raven in tow. He plans to kill her but she manages to roll down the window and scream for help. They both escape and Hartnett ends up back home to kill his wife. His wife roofies him and the cops arrive to tase his ass. They chain him up like Edward Kemper, and lead him to the paddy wagon parked outside. On the way, Hartnett stops at his daughter’s bike on the front lawn and asks to touch it. The police inexplicably let him and he pilfers a piece of the bike. He then uses that piece to get out of his handcuffs and he escapes for the fourth time and the movie ends.

FINAL CONSENSUS: Trap is aggressively dumb with massive plot holes half-covered up with lazy narrative contrivances. However, it commits to the bit so hard that it’s actually kind of endearing. Theater trap doors get left open for inexplicably large amounts of time with no one guarding them, the FBI plans to detain and interview 3000 suspects at the concert, and the list goes on and on. Besides the 15 final sloggish minutes, it kept me fully engaged throughout. If you can turn your brain off and just go with its logic, you’ll enjoy it. Shit, you may even love it. But I think a lot of folks are just going to find it too stupid to engage with. Grade: C+ (In Theaters)

PS: The ending is really bad. Just underwhelming and lazily written. Lazily written because Night is just pulling out every escape movie cliche in the book and chucking it at the camera, hoping one sticks. Underwhelming because it doesn’t go nearly as bat-shit crazy, off-the-walls as it should. Look Mr. Night, if you’re going to trap us in a theater for 105 minutes watching the dumbest shit ever, at least go for broke with the ending, what do you have to lose? WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO LOSE? No really, what do you have to lose? Nothing! Nothing in the movie makes sense anyway, so why don’t you just have fucking Hartnett explode into a million little CGI spiders that are actually aliens doing a study on human beings to see how they isolate sociopaths in a community or something. I don’t know. Have it be ghosts again. Have the old criminal psychologist lady take off her wig and be Bruce Willis. I DGAF, just send us out on a bang, not a whimper. I watched Signs last night and legitimately teared up at the scene where Mel Gibson tells his kids the stories of when they were born. What happened, M. Night? Don’t you have another smart thriller in you?

Didi

Didi is the type of movie that festival attendees go apeshit over at Sundance but then completely forget about come fall awards season. It’s a coming-of-age story but also a first generation American immigrant story. It’s mainly a comedy-drama that observes what it was like to be a 13-year-old Taiwanese-American boy circa 2008 in the Bay Area. It’s very much like a lot of coming-of-age movies you’ve seen and while it doesn’t offer anything strikingly new or unique apart from a couple of sequences involving a dead squirrel, an animated talking fish head and garage tutoring, and the fact it’s about a Taiwanese first generation American, it’s a very engaging experience that flies by at 91 minutes.

The supremely talented Izaac Wang with very expressive eyes plays Chris Wang, nicknamed Wang Wang by his group of friends. They’re your average 13-year-olds, destroying property while talking like characters from Superbad. They’re all well developed, relatable and refreshingly not all white kids. They’re trying to hook up but still super awkward around girls, and they do stupid shit constantly like organize a random fight club with each other. Eventually, Wang Wang meets a girl he likes. He instantly stalks her MySpace page so he can get closer to her by saying he likes things she likes. There’s a really funny scene where she asks him what his favorite movie is so he looks on her page and randomly picks A Walk to Remember.

However, shit is super awkward at that age so he eventually drifts away from his friends and into a new group, a group of skaters who need someone to film their wheelies and shit. Wang Wang lies about being a videographer to get in with them and that takes his life on another detour. At home, his father is absent because he’s working hard to provide for the family in Taiwan. His older sister is days away from leaving for college and his mother played by Twin Peaks‘ Joan Chen is his struggling artist mom trying to keep everyone together. The dad’s mom, the grandma is played by Chang Li Hua and she’s really funny in a fairly familiar Asian grandma role.

Didi is undoubtedly full of great little moments but its biggest detractor is its ambition. It simply tries to do too much. It’s as if filmmaker Sean Wang put Eighth Grade, Superbad, Mid90s, Minari, Yi Yi, Good Boys, and a bunch of other coming-of-age teen comedy/dramas in a blender and hoped for the best. Many critics will tell you, and I agree, that Didi is its best when it is itself and deals with the specificities of this story without trying to be other stories. Far and away the most compelling relationship in entire film is between Wang Wang and his mom. Unfortunately, Didi doesn’t really explore that until almost the third act. It feels back-loaded with heavy emotional context between the two that would no doubt better serve the movie sprinkled throughout so that when we arrive at their final scene together it would hit that much harder. I also wish the sister and grandma characters were a little more specifically drawn.

Overall, this is a very good feature-length debut by Sean Wang. It’s funny, heartfelt, has an Oscar-nomination worthy performance by Joan Chen and a great young actor performance by Izaac Wang. I only groaned in frustration when it’s tries to be Superbad or Mid90s because the original content they had to work with was so good. Like Wang Wang himself, I just wish this movie had a little more confidence in itself. Grade: B (In Theaters)

Tarot

Aggressive contender for worst horror film of the year, Anna Halberg and Spenser Cohen‘s Tarot is a numbing and exhausting experience. Sure it’s stupid and follows no clear logic, but that isn’t why it’s so bad. Sure, the CGI is pure dog shit and the movie isn’t scary for even a second, but that’s also not why it’s so poor. Tarot is terrible because every character, every directing choice, and every single word of the screenplay is so thoroughly uninspired, often feeling so bland or stiff you have to wonder how big a hand Chat GPT had in crafting it. I’m all for dumb horror movies but once they cross the rubicon into ‘lazy writing’, that’s where I tune out.

So…the plot? Fuck, let me try to explain this. There are these Gen Z teens who are hanging out in a creepy house or something. Two of them just broke up with each other, so teen angst is thick in the air. Smart Girl, the jilted lover, is basically the main character and leader of the group because she’s the only semi-intelligent teen there. Her ex-boyfriend, Entitled Guy, is all pissed off cause he completely alienated someone who didn’t see him as “Entitled Guy.” Then there’s Gen-Z Kramer played by Spider-Man’s Jacob Batalon, the dumb but lovable cause he’s virtually harmless friend who is all up in everyone’s business. There’s also Cartoonishly Handsome Young Republican who is really into money and making it rich, and then there’s three more girls I can’t remember other than one has red hair cause I thought it was Sadie Sink for a minute. Anyway, the teens find an old haunted deck of tarot cards and Smart Girl, since she’s the only person in this movie that knows how to do anything, reads all of their horoscopes. However, each horoscope card has a creepy circus villain on it and those villains come to life to pick off the teens one by one based on their shitty personalities. It’s all PG-13 violence though one person gets beaten to death with a ladder and one gets hanged on a bridge.

So, the teens start disappearing or dying one by one and Smart Girl and Gen-Z Kramer are the only two who want to do anything about it. They go visit the old woman from The Watchers, who plays basically the same person as she did in that other piece of shit. She explains to the teens, in the most gut-bustingly hilarious piece of dialogue I’ve heard all year, that horoscopes can be dangerous. She tells them the backstory of some persecuted psychic who bound their soul to a deck of tarot cards as a way to attack people for revenge or something. I don’t know, I was reading about Tim Walz on my phone at this point I think. Anyway, it ends and I don’t remember how. The point being is that this is a type of very forgettable, paint-by-numbers teen slasher that only gets made so 13-year-olds can go to it and make out the whole time. Good for the teenagers, I guess. Tough toodles for me. Grade: D- (Netflix)

Cinnamon

Just three weeks ago, I reviewed a Tarantino knock-off titled The Last Stop in Yuma County. That movie had excellent production value, good performances, and clever plot twists. I remarked I was surprised that thirty years after Pulp Fiction these movies still get made. This week I have the pleasure of reviewing Cinnamon, more of a knock-off of a knock-off of a knock-off of a Tarantino movie. It opens strong, has a great soundtrack and decent performances across the board, but it’s so overly written in its dumb dialogue and tries so hard to be funny that you end up cringing more than anything. Still, you gotta admire first-time filmmaker Bryian Keith Montgomery, Jr.’s passion and ambition here. In a time where movies are basically cranked out via assembly line, this guy actually put time and effort into his work. Even if it’s more than a bit amateurish and self-indulgent.

Cinnamon is a crime/comedy/thriller about a bunch of people and a small-town crime syndicate that gets caught up in a gas station robbery gone wrong. In the middle of everything is Jodi Jackson (a good Hailey Kilgore), a gas station worker/aspiring pop star, and her outlaw boyfriend, Eddie (a very good David Iacano), our young heroes we root for. Pam Grier plays Mama, a blind and very ruthless crime boss who runs the town with her cowboy-hat-clad sons (Jeremie Harris and DeVon Johnson). Damon Wayans is delightful here as the sleazy owner of the gas station who is paying monthly kickbacks to Grier and her boys. From there, the plot takes some very predictable twists and turns and extended character-focused dialogue scenes that are intended to be way funnier than they end up being.

For a Tubi Original Movie, Cinnamon is quite good but out of that context it’s supremely mediocre. It may underwhelm you at points, but it never flat-out bores you, and at only 92 minutes, it flies by pretty quickly. Grade: C (Tubi)