What To Expect From Trap
M. Night Shyamalan's Next Movie Continues A Career Trend

While Trap plot details remain under wraps, the film has been confirmed to be in the thriller genre, which is in keeping with most of Shyamalan's other films, including Knock at the Cabin. Shyamalan has also written the script for the movie, which is also typical of the filmmaker. In addition to Hartnett, the Trap cast includes Saleka Shyamalan, Hayley Mills, and Marnie McPhail, among others.
Since Trap is not a movie from a struck studio, the film was able to enter production in August 2023 in Ohio as the SAG-AFTRA strike continued. With filming having reportedly wrapped in December, there's no reason why the film won't be able to hit its planned August release date. Many other films originally planned for 2024 haven't been so lucky, with numerous projects having now been delayed into 2025.

Trap's actual plot may not yet have been revealed, but past Shyamalan movies suggest that there will be some kind of twist featured somewhere in the narrative. Most past entries in the filmmaker's filmography have either revolved around or included one unexpected twist, including the likes of The Sixth Sense, Old, Signs, Split, and Knock at the Cabin. With Trap's release date now about six months away, the first promotional materials for the film will hopefully start to be released in the next month or two.

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It’s a Trap!

Oh, the sound I just made. M. Night Shyamalan has been sorta-kinda mounting a comeback for almost a decade now, starting with 2015’s low-budget horror The Visit all the way through to last year’s end-of-the-world-thriller Knock at the Cabin. (Let’s just skip over Glass, all right? It still hurts.) As an old Shyamalan-head, I’ve mostly greeted the renaissance with respectable grunts, but there’s something about the premise of his latest, Trap, slated to hit theaters August 9.

Josh Hartnett plays a hot dad who’s taking his teenage daughter to see a vaguely Rihanna-esque superstar — played by Shyamalan’s own offspring Saleka (whose sister Ishana is also hitting theaters this summer with her own directorial debut) — when he notices cops massing at the venue. Naturally, one wonders: Terrorism? Aliens? A rival superstar mounting a siege? Not quite. As Hot Dad Hartnett learns from a merch-stand employee, the cops hope to capture a serial killer they believe is attending the concert. Turns out, Hot Dad Hartnett happens to have a nanny cam watching the victim in his basement. Did we forget this is a Shyamalan flick? Now that’s a twist. Will it be the only one? Hope not!

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Trap - Official Trailer #2 (2024) Josh Hartnett, M. Night Shyamalan

Watch the new Trap movie trailer. Trap is a crime mystery thriller from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.

A father and teen daughter attend a pop concert, where they realize they’re at the center of a dark and sinister event.

Trap stars Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Hayley Mills, and Allison Pill. The film is written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan alongside being produced by  Ashwin Rajan, Marc Bienstock, and M. Night Shyamalan. The executive producer is Steven Schneider.

Trap in theaters only nationwide in the US on August 2, 2024 and internationally beginning on July 31.

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M. Night Shyamalan considers himself lucky to still be directing

M. Night Shyamalan is astonished that he is still making movies over 30 years on from his directorial debut.

M. Night Shyamalan is amazed by the longevity of his directing career.

The 53-year-old filmmaker's latest psychological thriller 'Trap' is due to be released next month and he is grateful to still be behind the camera more than three decades on from his debut picture 'Praying with Anger'.

Shyamalan told Empire magazine: "Well, to be still doing this after 30 years is so exciting. They are original movies, but they are also from the same author. This is part of a longer conversation that pre-existed this and will continue after this. It's so rare, to have this relationship with the audience."

The 'Sixth Sense' filmmaker added: "You know, I've had number-one movies in four separate decades now. Which is absolutely insane, what I just said to you."

Despite his success, Shyamalan takes nothing for granted when it comes to directing.

He said: "If 'Trap' was my last movie, I'd be so happy about that. It's already beyond anybody's wildest dreams?"

'Trap' is set a pop concert where police are attempting to snare a serial killer and Shyamalan explained that Josh Hartnett was the perfect actor to play the killer known as 'The Butcher'.

"Josh Hartnett might be one of the rarest people because he is that kind of superstar. Honestly, I can tell you that no-one could have done the part better. No-one. Out of seven billion people."

A trailer for the film proved popular with fans when it was released earlier this year and Shyamalan knows that a successful movie begins long before it comes out in the cinema.

He said: "The response (to the trailer) was so amazing.

"The story already starts months before you come into the movie theatre. As a storyteller, I have to be part of that. I was very careful."

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M. Night Shyamalan’s Daughter and ‘Trap’ Star Saleka Debuts ‘Save Me,’ a New Song From the Film

Singer and actress Saleka Shyamalan, daughter of top director M. Night, has released the single “Save Me.”

The song is taken from M. Night Shyamalan’s upcoming thriller “Trap,” which is due Aug. 2 and stars Saleka as well as Josh Hartnett, Hayley Mills and Marnie McPhail. In the film, Saleka plays the fictional pop icon Lady Raven, with Hartnett as a doting father who takes his teenage daughter to see the singer in concert. However, things take a sinister turn when it becomes clear that a large number of police are at the concert looking for a serial killer.

“Save Me” is among the 14 songs she composed, performed and produced for the film’s soundtrack album, “Lady Raven,” which features special appearances by Kid Cudi, Russ and Amaarae.

Saleka was actually the inspiration for the film: Speaking with Variety’s Jenelle Riley, M. Night said he was inspired to write the story after watching his daughter perform and collaborated closely with her, writing the script as she wrote songs for the film.

“I would say to Saleka, ‘This is the outline, and we need this moment here. This is what he’s doing at this moment, and I need a song here,’ and she just went away and wrote, kind of slightly scoring it in the way she was writing the songs,” he said. “I didn’t ask her to do that, she was just feeling it out and commenting on the scenes.”

Speaking about the film’s soundtrack, Saleka said, “There’s a duality. I wanted to make an album that could stand on its own and embody the sounds and genres I love. At the same time, every song was made for a specific scene with clear intention.

“Having the external storyline made the process so inspired,” she continued. “I could write in a way that was incredibly free since I wasn’t thinking about myself. I ended up editing myself less and exploring facets of my own emotions that I would be too scared to dive into without having Lady Raven to speak through.”

The film was also inspired by the Shyamalans’ love for Bollywood and musicals.

“‘Purple Rain’ is one of our favorite movies,” she says. “Film and music often go hand in hand in our culture; they are equally important in Bollywood movies. The concept for ‘Trap’ came from family conversations in the kitchen about wanting to bring these two art forms together in our own way. I wrote a lot of the songs at my parents’ house in the living room. This project felt like home, but allowed me to try musical ideas I never had before. It’s so pure and special to me.”

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Josh Hartnett  at 'Trap' World Premiere in NYC   

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‘Trap’ Review: Josh Hartnett Plays a Serial Killer in an M. Night Shyamalan Thriller Where Each Twist is More Contrived Than the Last

It starts out at a pop-diva concert, designed as an elaborate trap to catch Hartnett's killer. But his emotions are no more believable than his escapes.

Owen Gleiberman

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As a filmmaker, M. Night Shyamalan has been a household name for 25 years, starting in 1999, when he ruled the end of the summer with “The Sixth Sense.” You can basically divide the Shyamalan oeuvre into four periods. There was the era when he was an A-list visionary who some compared to Spielberg (a period that includes his finest film, “Unbreakable,” as well as “Signs” and “The Village”). There was the era when he began to lapse into self-parody (“Lady in the Water,” “The Happening”), and when the whole notion of the Shyamalan twist ending became less an entertainer’s trademark than a sign of the rut he was in.

There was the period when he left all that behind to reinvent himself as an anonymous sci-fi craftsman (“The Last Airbender,” “After Earth”). And then there was the comeback era that began with “Split” (2016), his big hit featuring James McAvoy as a chatterbox psycho with multiple-annoying-personality disorder. From that point on, the Shyamalan brand regained a kind of parody of its former luster. People were coming out to see his films again, but his A-list aura had been replaced by an unabashed anything-goes B-movie trashiness.

You go into a new Shyamalan movie assuming that it will fall into that last period, but always hoping that he’ll revert back to the Shyamalan we first fell for: the spectacular sleight-of-hand thriller artist. Yet “Trap,” his new movie, may actually herald a new period for Shyamalan. Let’s call it the so-contrived-it-makes-Brian-De-Palma’s-loopiest-flights-of-fancy-look-real era.

For about half the film, we’re watching a movie in the genre of De Palma’s “Snake Eyes”: a real-time thriller set in a crowded performance arena, where a giant entertainment event is both center stage and the drama’s elaborate backdrop. The event, in this case, is a concert given by Lady Raven, a pop superstar (played by Shyamalan’s daughter, Saleka Shyamalan) who’s a kind of mashup of Lady Gaga and Olivia Rodrigo. Her songs are pulsating and catchy (Saleka Shyamalan wrote them, and they’re pretty damn good, as is her performance), inspiring her fans, who are mostly teenage girls, to sing along with every word and to scream at nearly every moment in awestruck Beatlemania.
One of those fans is Riley (Alison Donoughue), a winsome middle schooler who has come to the concert, at Tanaka Arena, with her father, Cooper (Josh Hartnett). He’s trying to bond with her by playing up the “I’m a hip dad!” enthusiasm as he shepherds her to her dream concert. But he’s trying too hard. When he drops a word like “jelly” (for jealous), it’s cringe. And though he’s gotten them seats on the floor (in the 44th row), her friends — or, rather, the cool girls who were friends with her last week, until they weren’t — have better seats. In the perpetual reality competition show that is middle-class domestic life in the 21st century, that means that Cooper has done his job just…okay.

Hartnett, who exudes star quality (he always did), imbues the character with an overeager sweetness that draws us right in. At least, it does until Cooper goes for a bathroom break and takes out his cell phone…to check up on the victim he has got imprisoned in a suburban basement somewhere. Not exactly the movie we thought we were watching. But yes, we’ve seen this movie too.
Warning: This is not a spoiler ­— it’s the very premise of “Trap.” Cooper is a serial killer known as the Butcher. He has 12 victims, each of whom he has left cut up in pieces. There’s been a manhunt to catch him going on for seven years. But now the authorities, led by a veteran FBI profiler (played by the British former child actor Haley Mills), have sprung the ultimate trap. They have learned that the Butcher is going to be attending Lady Raven’s concert. And so they’ve surrounded Tanaka Arena with S.W.A.T. team members; no one can get out. There are 20,000 people attending the concert, 3,000 of whom are adult males. The authorities have various (conflicting) clues about the killer from surveillance footage (they’ve never seen what he looks like), and one possible clue: an animal tattoo. They know the Butcher is at the concert. Their agenda is to uncover him.   

Right away, though, you may think: How, exactly, are they going to do that? Serial killers are notorious wizards at eluding the police. They’re all about anonymity. Is the FBI going to interrogate each of the 3,000 men at the concert before they leave? That would take three days. Or is the profiler, with that sixth sense of hers, going to somehow know who he is?

Cooper learns about all of this from a T-shirt clerk at a merch counter, and from the moment he does, his agenda is to slip out of the concert. Even though, as he discovers, the only possible way to do that is by getting backstage. For a while, as Cooper does things like steal a pass key, infiltrate a police pep talk, and bicker with the mother (Marnie McPhail) of one his daughter’s fickle friends, we go with the flow of the action, even as it’s all a bit heightened in its Shyamalan Zone unreality. Josh Hartnett is such a good actor that we’re more willing than not to follow in his paces as a killer in the vein of Joseph Cotton’s treacherous Uncle Charlie in Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt.”

But then we arrive at the moment where Shyamalan, tapping out his screenplay (I have long claimed that Shyamalan the writer martyrs Shyamalan the director), comes up with a twist where someone should really have looked over his shoulder and said, “No.” It actually involves Shyamalan in a cameo appearance. He plays the uncle of Lady Raven, who Cooper just happens to run into in the middle of the concert. This allows Cooper to tell a lie about Riley having had leukemia, which is his way of getting her to be chosen as the Dreamer Girl who goes onstage to dance with Lady Raven. All of this happens…so that the film can get Cooper backstage!

Around the time Cooper engages in a private dialogue with Lady Raven in her dressing room, we’re watching a movie that has abandoned all logic and plausibility. It’s not that I don’t buy that they could have that meeting; it’s that he outs himself to her as the killer. From that point on, whatever elaborate plan he comes up with, couldn’t she just…identify him? I guess we’re supposed to say, “Aha! It’s a ride! Go with it!” But asking an audience to go with something this fundamentally farfetched borders on an insult. More to the point: It’s not fun.

The second half of “Trap” is one trap door of contrivance after another. The movie turns into a “study” of Cooper: his stealth moves, his mommy issues, his divided personality. Yes, he really is a butcher, but he’s also a family man who loves his children. Talk about a split. A movie like “The Boston Strangler” (1968) dealt with this kind of thing in a haunting way, but as the contrivances of “Trap” balloon into something almost grotesque in their borderline absurdity, the movie raises the question: How invested can we be in a high-concept serial killer whose emotions are no more believable than his escapes?

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Hayley Mills Talks Hunting Down Josh Hartnett, Her Return to Film in M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Trap’

Mills stars as an FBI profiler attempting to capture a killer in Shyamalan's latest blockbuster: "I wasn't sure if I'd ever make another movie."

Hayley Mills didn’t think she would star in a film ever again — but when M. Night Shyamalan comes knocking, you answer.

“It was lovely to be on a movie set again,” the British actress tells The Hollywood Reporter. “There’s more space, you can take deeper breaths… And certainly, on a movie of Night’s, you don’t rush.”

Most will know Mills as a child star, whose early career blossomed with leading roles in movies like Tiger Bay (1959), Pollyanna (1960) and The Parent Trap (1961). Now, at 78 years old, she takes a turn into a genre much darker: hunting down a psychopathic serial killer Cooper (Josh Hartnett, no less) who, upon taking his teenage daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert, finds himself caught in an enormous, FBI-orchestrated trap.
That’s the film. Trap is M. Night Shyamalan’s latest piece of work and, releasing in theaters on Friday, features Mills as FBI profiler Dr. Grant. “She’s brought in out of retirement to track down a serial killer, and she’s very experienced,” Mills says of her character. “She’s been lecturing and writing books and things about [killers] and I think her age is a relevant factor in the movie for the protagonist.”

Mills says her time away from film can be blamed on her age. The leading roles “just weren’t there” as she got into her 40s, 50s, and 60s, so she found work in television and the theater instead. “[Trap] came completely unexpected, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever make another movie — I wasn’t shedding any tears. People often look at you and think, ‘This is a Disney actress, isn’t it?'” But when her agent was in touch about Shyamalan’s next blockbuster, Mills was ready to dive back in: “It’s a part I would have never expected to be considered for.” Soon, after meeting with Trap‘s casting director, Douglas Aibel, she was on a plane to Toronto.
“He’s the complete movie maker, from the beginning, middle, and end,” she says of The Sixth Sense director, who also wrote the film. “He understands the characters so very well. He knows their thought process. If you’re not thinking what he thinks your character should be thinking, he spots it instantly.”

Mills describes Trap as Shyamalan’s “ultimate vision,” adding that audiences will be entertained at the theater because of how cohesive the movie is. “It’s a movie that’s written, directed and funded by one man. It’s his movie. The sound, the music, is wonderful. And for somebody who shoulders so much, he’s so relaxed and funny and lovely and warm and encouraging and appreciative on the set.”
She says she had more big laughs on this set, with Shyamalan, than she’s had for years. A combination of “excitement, tension and laughter,” the film showcases another side to Hartnett, too. In their cat-and-mouse relationship in Trap, Hartnett taps into that frightening side necessary to portray a compelling killer. Even Mills had whiplash due to the star’s acting chops. “On-screen, he can change from being lovely, charming, that lovely smile. And then it goes. You see the calculating, cold killer. It’s a wonderful performance.”

Mills also explains that the connection between Cooper and Dr. Grant is “remote.” “I represent something specific for him, and he represents something specific for me,” she says. “I can’t really say much more because Warner Brothers will come down on me like a ton of bricks (Laughs.)”
Playing a killer isn’t as easy as you think, she says. “It’s quite challenging. It’s like actors who have to play Hitler, they have to find a way to like themselves playing Hitler. They have to find a way to really believe and justify who they are and what they’re doing. You have to burrow into your deepest, darkest places. There’s a resistance to doing that. But I think Josh does that so well. You’ll see. He gets a balance between that darkness but also because he’s a naturally charming person and he’s got a great sense of humor.”

She tips her hat to Alison Pill, Hartnett’s wife in the film, and Donoghue, playing his teenage daughter, who was just 13 years old when they shot the movie. It’s a level of talent that Mills once had at a young age and — if M. Night Shyamalan’s opinion is anything to go by — still very much possesses today.

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‘Trap’ Review: A Wily Josh Hartnett Propels M. Night Shyamalan’s Moderately Entertaining Thriller

In the director's latest film, a father and daughter attend a pop concert that becomes part of a ploy to catch a deadly serial killer.

August 1, 2024 9:04pm
According to M. Night Shyamalan, the premise of his latest feature boils down to a simple question: “What if The Silence of the Lambs happened at a Taylor Swift concert?”

It’s an inventive concept, but Trap delivers on one of those references more than the other. The film is a concert movie for Shyamalan’s daughter, the musician Saleka, wrapped in a middling thriller kept afloat by a compelling performance from Josh Hartnett. 
Trap opens with Cooper (Hartnett), a dad-joke machine, and his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) at a concert for pop sensation Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan). The stadium overflows with hyperactive adolescents, some waiting outside hoping to catch a glimpse of the singer emerging from her trailer and others practicing one of Lady Raven’s viral dance routines in the lobby.
Riley, who has been struggling with some friends at school, seems particularly excited. She rushes her father through the parking lot where they’ve parked, eagerly joins a group of girls dancing near concessions and marvels at the merchandise available for purchase. This would be a typical concert scene if it weren’t for the swarm of police officers patrolling the arena and guarding each entrance.

With the help of an amusing merchandise vendor, Jamie (a scene-stealing Jonathan Langdon), Cooper learns that Lady Raven’s show is a sting operation. Federal agents and local authorities are trying to catch The Butcher, a serial killer whose victim count recently entered double digits. As Jamie divulges the details of the enterprise, including the special code words staff must use in the presence of The Butcher, Cooper gets increasingly nervous.
For the truly spoiler-averse, now is the time to stop reading. (Just know that you should stay for a funny post-credits sequence.) Those who watched the trailer know that Cooper is the wanted man, but that’s only the first twist.

Shyamalan’s Trap has more tricks than recent offerings like Knock at the Cabin, but they are more of the raised-eyebrow kind than the sharp-inhale-of-surprise variety. After Cooper gathers the initial intel, Trap becomes a suspenseful game of cat and mouse. The first half of the film is precise and entertaining. Working with master cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Shyamalan gleefully experiments with off-kilter shots and negative space to render the arena as a booby-trapped maze. The director effectively grounds us in Cooper’s perspective, coaxing us to map our own escape routes

For a while, it’s thrilling to see Cooper outwit the authorities and Hartnett is a big part of that. His performance is wily, often funny and subtle in its shiftiness. He’s introduced as an anxious father but then his particular behaviors — a hyper-attention to detail, the effortful attempt to control his jaw muscles, the tenseness of his smile — become signs of a more malevolent violence. As Cooper sneaks into private areas, chats up the arena staff and schemes a getaway, one can see how his charm and humor make him a perfect suburban husband to wife Rachel (Alison Pill) and father to their kids, as well as an infamous murderer. Hartnett convincingly balances Cooper’s bifurcated identity: He is a serial killer whose relief comes from cutting up his victims’ bodies and a father trying to give his daughter the world.
Shyamalan can probably relate to the latter desire of Cooper’s. The first half of Trap betrays the director’s greater interest. Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka wrote, produced and recorded an entire album for the film, which adds a haunting layer to composer Herdis Stefansdottir’s score. Many of Saleka’s songs are featured in their entirety, and much of the beginning of the film is dedicated to seeing her strut across the stage in elaborate outfits or mimic the moves of her cadre of backup dancers. These moments also double as a study of star power in the social media age. The glow of phones raised in the air to record moments, the viral choreography and the community of dangerously committed fans are all explored at some point.

With so many different threads, Trap struggles to maintain its momentum. The repetitive nature of Cooper’s chase blunts the stakes and a side quest with Lady Raven ends up not feeling as significant as it should. By the end of the second act and well into the third, Trap, although stylishly directed, can’t help but lose some of its edge.

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Josh Hartnett Chose to Be Shirtless in Trap's Climactic Scene: 'I Didn't Want to Cheat the Audience' (Exclusive)

"I wanted it to be as raw and scary and f---ed up as possible," says the actor

Josh Hartnett is explaining why he opted to be shirtless for that chilling scene near the end of Trap.

In the thriller, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, Hartnett plays Cooper, a suburban dad who leads a double life as a serial killer nicknamed The Butcher.

In one climactic scene, Cooper, who is on the run from the FBI after being exposed, confronts his wife (Alison Pill) while she's home alone. She admits to tipping off authorities about attending the Lady Raven concert, where they staged a trap to catch him.

The tense sequence sees Cooper remove his shirt before trying to kill Pill's character, who, it turns out, poisoned his slice of pie just in time. Hartnett, 46, tells PEOPLE it was his idea to be shirtless for that moment.

"I didn't want to cheat the audience," he says. "I wanted it to be as raw and scary and f---ed up as possible. Knowing that he's OCD, and that he's got these sort of qualities about himself that doesn't want to make a mess, I thought wouldn't it be interesting if over the course of this he just starts taking his shirt off and it gets really visceral."

"Then gouging the guy's eyes, all that monster stuff was really important to me," continues Hartnett, "because I felt like you had to know that this person you've been following, who you may be charmed by, is an actual monster. I think it's important for the movie."

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The Real-Life Event That Inspired M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Trap’

The filmmaker's latest thriller may have an outlandish plot, but it's closer to reality than viewers may think.

M. Night Shyamalan is no stranger to high-concept thrillers. His latest film, Trap, takes a Silence of the Lambs-inspired approach at an unlikely location: a packed concert by pop star Lady Raven (played by the director’s daughter, Saleka). Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is a seemingly normal suburban dad who takes his daughter to see her favorite artist. While striking up a conversation with a venue vendor, he finds out that the show is actually a trap: the FBI has a plan to catch a serial killer called “The Butcher” after learning he would be in attendance. But, as revealed in the trailer, Cooper is The Butcher and has to find a way to escape.
While the plot may sound outlandish, it’s partially based on a true story. Shyamalan shared that Trap took inspiration from the real-life Operation Flagship. “I heard about it when I was a kid and I thought it was totally absurdist, that this actually happened,” the filmmaker told BBC News. “It was something that was in my head a lot when it happened.”

“[The authorities] used the absurdity against them because they lowered their guard, which I thought was quite brilliant,” he added to the outlet. “So it just stuck with me, and I guess when Saleka and I were thinking about a movie at a concert, I wondered, why would this person not be able to get out, and how can I keep them there?”

The December 1985 sting operation, organized by the United States Marshals and Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department, tricked more than 100 wanted fugitives into going to the Washington Convention Center, under the guise of having won free tickets to a Washington Redskins (now the Washington Commanders) game against the Cincinnati Bengals, as well as a chance to win tickets to the 1986 Super Bowl. It was said to be part of a special event celebrating the inauguration of a new D.C. sports TV network called Flagship International Sports Television Inc. (it shares the same acronym as the U.S. Marshals Service’s Fugitive Investigative Strike Team). To collect their tickets, the “winners” were told to show up at a brunch a few hours before the game.
Upon arrival, the fugitives were split into small groups and taken into “party rooms” with snacks and posters that read “Let’s party!” Marshals and police officers posed as event staffers, with female officers dressed as cheerleaders hugging the guests to check for weapons. The men were also given balloons, categorizing them by color; violent criminals received red balloons.

Louie McKinney, the chief of enforcement operations for the U.S. Marshals, pretended to be an emcee, giving a speech to the attendees before they received their prize. As soon as McKinney said he had a “big surprise,” Marshals entered the room to arrest the delinquents, repeating the same process with each group. It became one of the most successful mass arrests of fugitives in American history.

“It was hilarious. The cops were literally cheerleaders and mascots,” Shyamalan said to Empire magazine in July. “And [the criminals] were all caught. It was so twisted and funny.”

Instead of using a popular football game (at the time of Operation Flagship, Redskins tickets were a particularly hot commodity), Shyamalan opted to set the trap in a concert with the scope of a Taylor Swift Eras Tour show. “I directed an entire concert,” the filmmaker told Empire. “And it wasn’t just a thing in the background. It’s equally important. There is no pretend concert going on. I love the idea of cinema as windows within windows. One of the reasons to come see the movie at the movie theater is because there’s literally a real concert that you can see nowhere except in that movie.”

Retired federal agent Tobias Roche, who was part of Operation Flagship, fact-checked to British GQ how accurately thought out Shyamalan’s movie was. In Trap, the venue has a SWAT team waiting outside, as well as visible police inside, who question concertgoers. Roche argued that the officers should have been more stealth. He explained that Operation Flagship was planned out to avoid any suspicions and distract the criminals, which is why it was successful. “We were worried that some of [the fugitives] would recognize each other from maybe being incarcerated together or being involved in criminal activities together,” said Roche.
In the movie, a chatty vendor gives away the scheme. Roche told GQ that in this kind of operation, everyone would have to keep mum on the plan for it to work. He recalled that an attorney representing a local company that had the exclusive rights to Redskins games showed up to convention center, stating that the inaugural event for the — unbeknownst to him, fake — broadcasting company Flagship International Sports Television was illegal. The man was taken aside and told what was actually happening; he kept it a secret. “He was really good about it,” said Roche. “He wound up watching the entire sting with us from the control room.” But if the lawyer had blown their cover, the operation would have been shut down.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie … 235968441/