Granted, it's been a long time since I could legitimately imagine myself as 'down with the homeys' and even longer since I attended the concert of a pop diva, or even the daughter of the film director here.
This will do her musical career no harm, I imagine, and the cynics will cry convenient nepotistic marketing. I am very familiar, however, with the works of M Knight Shyamalan as I am almost certain you are too. As such, we already know what to expect. The unexpected, right? We're all just sitting here, waiting for the mic to drop. It doesn't happen every time, but when he's on form, he is remarkable.
Of course, there are a host of questions here, not least the common sense of our lead, who as soon as he gets wind of the real story behind the pop fluff, acts in a way that defies real logic. If you are being pursued, but your pursuers don't know who you are or what you look like, where is the sense in actively trying to act as though you are being pursued? Why wouldn't you just enjoy the concert and leave with the throng of other innocent concert-goers when its finished? Unless, maybe they know exactly who they are looking for?
Perhaps serial killers are all so over-anxiously internalized that they simply can't help themselves, but Hartnett's character doesn't give off such overt character traits. Nor would you expect him to, already being so notorious as to have earned a nickname.
Hartnett is compelling enough but not really until the thing starts ramping up and he gets to show off maybe more helter-skelter, his hand forced by the pursuit and his own decisions. When we eventually get out of the auditorium, the whole thing shifts and we're left wondering why the whole hour set up even happened aside from promoting Shyamalan's daughters music career.
As a character study, Shyamalan is trying really hard to give this substance, but as usual, his characters are just off the real world kilter enough to not be able to engage with any of them fully. It does have its moments, certainly, when you forget you're holding your breath, but these moments are rare and the signature twist we would all be expecting never really arrives.
Patience is a virtue that we all know all too well, and it is required here, as this is mostly (and I mean at least two-thirds) pointless fluff and only really gets truly interesting when the music stops. In summary, not the best work of his career by some margin, but far from his worst.
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