Directed by Patrick Lussler, Trick is a 2019 horror movie of the old-school slasher variety. On Halloween night in 2015, Patrick ‘Trick’ Weaver (Thom Niemann) kills five of his classmates, with Cheryl (Kristina Reyes, TV’s Blindspot) and Troy (Max Miller) left alive, and at the hospital, Trick is critically wounded and disappears. Over the next two year, Trick kills again, and Detective Mike Denver (Omar Epps, House) sets out to stop him.
+ Omar Epps was really good, and almost salvaged this movie. I enjoyed Reyes as the anti-damsel in distress, but the movie didn’t do much with her character
+ there are some brutal, Saw-esque kills performed by Trick which I always enjoy (though they do fall apart if you think about them too much). There is something about stabbings in particular that leave a lasting impression over the most intricate traps
+ a few incidental lines/moments in the police investigation portions of the movie were really interesting (for example Trick painting his face in a spiral to hide what his face and its shape looked like) but these too were left mostly as one liners
– overall, the movie is just not very good. I guessed the twist very early (and any horror fan will probably do the same) only for the rest of the movie to do its best to convince me I was wrong, before pulling the rug out with a self-gratifying ‘wow, who could have seen this coming’
– I was really put off by Troy (relative newcomer Max Miller) and how he was seemingly content to play a dollar store version of Adam DeVine
– as I was watching, I couldn’t help but think this was almost literally the same plot of In the Shadow of the Moon: a detective repeatedly faces off with a serial killer after the detective is certain he’s killed the cuplrit. Both movies had very unsatisfying endings, too
Should you see this film: No. I thought the idea of this movie was more interesting than what we got. Epps was really good, but even he was not enough to carry this ‘In the Shadow of the Moon meets Saw‘ mishmash. Trick is not a treat.
MoshFish Reviews 