Obviously, we all love Danny Boyle and want to have his babies — I’d like at least two of his babies — but his latest film, Trance, is a horrid mess. A psychological take on the art-heist film, it is miscast, iffily acted, confusing, implausible (to the extent I never fully understood what was happening) and is interspersed with bouts of horrible, ill-judged violence. In one instance, for example, a man gets shot in the penis. This need not be a dealbreaker necessarily but at some point, possibly before we’ve even had the first child, and to prevent such nonsense going any further, I will have to sit him down and say: ‘Danny, love, this shooting at penises has to stop. We’re going to be parents. Why not gardening? Or golf?’ Perhaps, after the redemptive feel of Slumdog and 127 Hours and the sheer joy of the Olympic opening ceremony, he felt he needed to produce something more visceral and Trainspotter-ish. Fair enough, but I so wish he hadn’t.
OK, the obligatory synopsis: Simon (James McAvoy) is a fine-art auctioneer who teams up with a criminal gang to steal a Goya. Problem is, after he’s cut the painting from the frame, he sustains a blow to the head and can’t remember where he has stashed it. The gang try torturing Simon — fingernails, I think; didn’t look — but when that fails, the gang leader, Franck (Vincent Cassel), suggests hypnotism. So Simon visits Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson), a sultry hypnotist who claims she can get at whatever is buried in Simon’s mind. But is Elizabeth everything she seems? Is Simon a reliable narrator? If not golf or gardening, how about whittling? That’s a pleasant hobby and, at the end of the day, Danny, you may even get a spoon out of it!
This is a conceptual movie, although scarcely an original one.
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