Trance

Danny Boyle is a master filmmaker! Think about his show reel: Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, The Olympic Opening Ceremony, 127 Hours & Slumdog Millionaire. What the hell was he thinking when he made Trance? It is honestly just a plain out terrible movie. It’s supposed to be about hypnotics, and an art theft, and forgetting where the loot was hidden and therefore using hypnotics to remember, but it gets lost in this mess of badly directed action, over the top cinematics and weird locations and out of order events. None of it makes sense.

In a post Inception world, making something like this is tricky to begin with, but that’s still no excuse for having absolutely no story line or reason for any of the events that happen in the movie to happen. It’s a total mess. I think he was trying to play with the timeline and put events out of order and out of sequence but unless you have that magical coming together of events like the car falling in Inception , while the hotel world was spinning around and the music was playing at different speeds to tie it all together, the audience doesn’t know where the events are actually taking place. It’s like watching a band play without instruments.

The single most amazing part of this film, though, is that Danny Boyle somehow made a naked Rosario Dawson unattractive. Rosario Dawson is a beautiful lady and even Kevin Smith was able to amp up her sex appeal in Clerks II, but somehow in amongst all the slick, shiny lights, heist wannabe film, he turns her into the most wooden, boring character I may have ever seen on the screen. The 'love triangle' between her, James McAvoy's character and Vincent Cassel's character that is apparently meant to tie this movie together (I don’t fully understand it as it’s never explained) is about as believable as Padme and Anakin in The Clone Wars. I'm amazed at how badly its done to be honest and how completely unbelievable it is. I almost laughed at the reveal of Ms Dawson walking down the corridor to James's character, and then later on in the film it tries to pay off the imagery as a reference of 'pure' art form. It was cringe inducing.

Not to mention the never explained relationships of James McAvoy and Vincent Cassels characters. I mean, they are in essence the main leads who are responsible for the art theft, the memory loss and every resulting action that takes place. But I couldn’t tell you a single thing about them. I don’t know how they are related to each other, why they were working together, why one of them seems to die and be reborn multiple times, and why only one of them gets a secret message (full of exposition to explain the whole movie you just watched) at the end of the movie? Its just .. I’m speechless. Those two characters are as one dimensional as can be, and unrelated to each other as R2D2 is to Spock, and they are the whole reason the events in the movie take place!

I hope this film is just a result of being spread too thin as Danny was working on this during the Olympic Opening Ceremony and I can’t imagine the stress and work required for creating something like that. That opening ceremony was a masterpiece in direction and style and conveyed a real and clear message. Trance is the opposite. If all of his efforts were going into making the ceremony over this movie then that makes perfect sense and what he achieved there was simply stunning. Let’s just forget this film was ever made, and leave it to Mr Skin to bury the nudity shots into their archives as it’s the only part of this film that will grab anyone’s attention, even if it’s from a small and morally dubious place.

SCORE: 3/10

IMDB Info for Trance