It is yet another movie I watched on an airplane, which is the best place to watch as you’re going to be happy you lived through the flight and not concentrating on how you wasted your life watching this. Yes, it’s another M. Night Shyamalan movie. Still, this time, it’s a vanity project because his daughter Saleka Night Shyamalan plays Lady Raven, the Taylor Swift of his universe, a singer beloved by young ladies who draws Riley (Ariel Donoghue) and her father Cooper (Josh Hartnett) to her concert. The problem? Cooper is a serial killer known as The Butcher, and this is all a trap — get it? — to arrest him.

He’s been hunted by Dr. Josephine Grant (Hayley Mills), an FBI profiler who has enacted her own parent trap — ugh, get it? — to arrest him.

The review from Benjamin Lee in The Guardian sums up so much of how I feel about Shyamalan’s work: “Trap is a thriller that incorrectly thinks it’s fiendishly smart. Maybe if it had been more aware of how stupid it actually is, it might have been a lot more fun.”

Each successive film from him — Old is nearly unwatchable and Knock at the Cabin was infuriating —  is dumber to the point that no human being acts like a real person, as if it was made by an alien who has just come to Earth with the kind of budget that allows him to keep making shitty movies no matter what. The Happening and The Last Airbender would end most careers, but here we are, almost two decades later, and we get a new Shyamalan movie nearly every year. And each time, I walk in saying, “This is it. This is the one.” And again, like burning my hand on the stove and never remembering that open flames can set my hand ablaze and how much it hurts, I watch his movies and wonder why my fingers are singed.

Here’s the pitch: “What if Silence of the Lambs happened at a Taylor Swift concert?” I hate that today’s movies keep using that superior film as a reference point and can’t come close to it. This was shot on 35mm and had a huge budget, but it had all the ideas of the lowest-budget streamer.

This feels six hours long with multiple end points that just end up being the next part of the movie, the best example of a movie where I look at how much time is left and being shocked that 35 minutes have passed and I am only a third of the way through. By the end, which has a surprise- he is ready to escape again- I was praying this was the movie’s end. It was, but then the post-credits sequence made me worried that this would have even more.

Look, I know I love some terrible filmmakers. Mattei, Franco, you name it. But yet, their movies speak to me, despite their ineptitude at times, because they are made by someone who seems to love making movies while making money. And I guess that M. Night loves movies too, but he should really embrace his inner scumbag. If his films had any edge or felt dangerous or scuzzy, I’d probably be one of his most prominent apologists. Instead, I’m covering my burned hand with creams and salves, wondering how I got into this situation all over again.