With a capacity of 15,800, Westside’s Utilita Arena is the biggest concert venue in the West Midlands, a magnet for music lovers who also visit nearby pubs, bars and restaurants on gig day.
With Trap set in the bowels of a similar hall, its staff might be drawn to the film to a/ feel the tension of something being amiss in a familiar environment, and b/ to learn how the devious can hide in plain sight.
Trap (15, 105 mins). A father takes his daughter to see a concert starring Lady Raven before making excuses for leaving the hall. With the FBI determined to find a serial killer, the film takes on a series of left-field turns both inside and outside of the venue.
Josh Hartnett plays the father and director M. Night Shyamalan shamelessly promotes his own daughter Saleka Shyamalan as Lady Raven. But of special interest to cinephiles will be the return of John Mills’ daughter Hayley Mills, now 78, as profiler Dr Josephine Grant.
The verdict: *** Despite many of the key scenes having been signalled in the trailers, Trap starts off well, with Shyamalan shying away from the more supernatural world to set his stall out in the oh-so familiar real one.
Indeed, this week’s unexpected cancellation of several Taylor Swift concerts re. security concerns in Vienna adds a certain contemporary spice to the action, never mind a tasered man attacking a police officer.
Hartnett’s lumbering physical presence is somewhere between Liam Neeson and Steven Seagal. But whereas they tend to fight men, Hartnett has to mimic a passive wardrobe once too often to be truly scary.
Despite the film’s multiple implausibilities offering added resistance to any sign of clock-ticking suspense, the troubling idea that a phone can be a remote control from afar helps Shyamalan to generate sufficient tension to make this one of his more watchable movies.
But after duds like Glass, Old and Knock at the Cabin that wasn’t too hard and, yet again, he’s fallen miles short of his debut with The Sixth Sense (1999).
Meanwhile, the BBFC says that when one character calls a serial killer a ‘nut job’, that is apparently an example of a ‘scene of mental health discrimination’.
Borderlands (12A, 101 mins). Cabin Fever and Hostel director Eli Roth offers an all-star cast in Hollywood’s latest video game adaptation. The action is set on a rubbish bin of a planet called Pandora where an alien species has to be confronted.
With Cate Blanchett (bounty hunter Lilith searching for an heiress), Jamie Lee Curtis (scientist Tannis), Kevin Hart (mercenary Roland) and Jack Black (voice of Claptrap), there was probably a lot of backstage fun. But that didn’t reach my shared audience which barely managed one collective titter.
The verdict: * If nothing else, Borderlands is a loud, colourful and utterly mindless distraction from the recent troubles on Britain’s streets, with bullets literally pooped out in one scene by a defecating robot.
“How are we going to get through this?” asks Ms Blanchett at one point. Indeed, when they could have all been making an original live-action film that might have stood the test of time.
Like the increasingly bloated Marvel canon in general, Borderlands simply drowns its talented stars in a tsunami of special effects before spitting them back out like uncooked popcorn kernels left over from prior screenings of Avatar, Stars Wars and Mad Max.
IT ENDS WITH US (15, 130 mins). Directed by actor Justin Baldoni, this adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s 2016 novel is an attempt to add sexual violence and domestic abuse themes to romcom sensibilities, dosed up with #metoo medicine.
Haunted by her traumatic childhood but dreaming of opening her own business, the older-than-the-book Lily finds that even with a new direction in life she can’t shake off bad memories.
Ryan Reynolds’ other half Blake Lively plays Lily, with Baldoni as her new love neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid and Brandon Sklenar as Lily’s returning first beau, Atlas Corrigan.
The verdict: *** Dramas with romance at their heart have fallen out of fashion. Although this one is more muscular than most, it ends up on a par with Hilary Swank’s eagerly-anticipated adaptation of Cecilia Ahern’s PS I Love You (2007), in that many of this book’s fans will have hoped for more.
It’s all watchable enough regardless of whether or not you have read it but, like Trap, there’s an easily copied disturbing scene on a flight of stairs of the kind that’s all too commonly seen on social media.
Picture credits: Trap, Warner Bros; Borderlands, Lionsgate; and It Ends With Us, Sony Pictures.
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