Three dollars and some change

AKA Movies I Watched On the Plane to Slovenia. In order of how much I liked them.

The Amateur (2025). After his wife is killed by terrorists and his bosses at the CIA refuse to do anything about it, computer nerd Charlie (Rami Malek) sets out to get revenge on them himself.

This is by far the most movie-like of these movies. It has a solid thriller structure and decent cinematography, and most importantly it has Malek, who is fantastic. Plus, who doesn't want to to root for the underdog? On the other hand, the espionage scene in this movie has a few too many gentlemen in it: gentlemanly CIA ages, gentlemanly terrorists. By the end this tipped over from charmingly quaint to silly. It also has way too few ladies in it, by which I mean there are four total and three of them end up dead. And it was very confused about what it wanted to say with its revenge plot, with an ending I found pretty unsatisfying.

Trap (2024). Cooper (Josh Hartnett) takes his daughter to a pop concert but then realizes the police are using the concert to trap a notorious serial killer, ie him. The first of my accidental Shyamalan double feature! This is directed by M. Night and features his daughter Saleka as the pop diva.

This movie is very silly. The basic premise of a psychopath trying to escape a concert without his daughter realizing anything is wrong was good fun, but most of the plot developments strain disbelief or just make no sense. Then they do actually get out of the concert venue in the third act, which means instead of the gimmicky premise the movie is having to stand entirely on the strengths of its plotting and character work, which are not up to the task. Cooper gets only the laziest of psychological development or motivation, and Hayley Mills (!!) as the FBI profiler leading the efforts to catch him is severely underused.

The worst thing about the third act, though, is that the daughter fades completely out of the picture, and we are supposed to care about first the pop diva (??) and then Cooper's wife (???) and their respective relationships/interactions with him. The wife in particular is a total curveball; she's had like two lines before she suddenly becomes the lynchpin of the final act. The pop diva, meanwhile, just can't act. And also I don't care! I thought this movie was going to be about Cooper and his daughter, what the fuck!

To me the piece of writing that typifies this movie is the FBI profiler saying towards the end that nobody could have noticed Cooper's psychopathy except maybe a parent. Meanwhile, Hartnett has spent the whole movie playing this character as only barely hinged.

The Watchers (2024). A young woman in Ireland named Mina agrees to drive a parrot to a neighboring city, gets lost in a wood of cosmic horrors, and ends up joining a group of other survivors trapped in a structure where creatures come to "watch" them every night. The second in my Shyamalan double feature, this was directed by his daughter Ishana Night.

Where Trap was silly, this movie is nonsense. Yes, these are meaningfully different in my head. 😅 This movie has greater ambitions, but its ideas are so scattered.
• It’s basically a creature feature, but the creatures are faires. Sure, okay.
• The main character Mina has an identical twin named Lucy, but this Dracula reference adds absolutely nothing.
• There are a lot of different instances of the theme of mimicry or likeness, but this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Mina’s emotional struggles or arc.
• The bird is a plot macguffin that hangs around most of the movie doing nothing and then leaves the narrative in the third act. (It’s alive and fine, though.)
• Like Trap, this movie eventually loses interest in its “trapped in a location” premise and wanders off to finish its story elsewhere, at which point the momentum and tension come to a screeching and permanent halt.

I’m reminded of Cuckoo, another indie horror movie with maybe more ideas than it knew how to execute, but Cuckoo looks like a screenwriting/directing/editing masterclass compared to this. Which is unfortunate, because IMO the cast was pretty good, and the cosmic elements could have been really cool and weird in the right hands.

All that said, I’m interested to see what Ishana Night Shyamalan does next. This was bad, but it wasn't boring, and I definitely did not guess where it was going.