A textbook example of a bad movie with a great performance buried inside. This time delivered by none other than where-have-you-been?/always-welcome Rosario Dawson.
What Works: Trance jumps off from an appealing premise: the never-compelling James McAvoy, who always sucks and sucks here, plays an art auctioneer who’s working with some hooligans to steal an expensive painting, but sustains a head-injury during the heist, thus depriving him of the memory of where the painting is. To relocate it, he’s forced into seeing an ambiguous hypnotist/therapist, played by, you guessed it, Rosario Dawson. Dawson steals the movie. Her character is deliberately thin, but she manages to make even the most ridiculous twist seem believable with her mysterious, sexy performance. The rest of this unintentionally goofy movie could have used some of her gritty/sultry slow-burn…
What Doesn’t Work: The rest of it. James McAvoy never met a scene he couldn’t overplay. I’ve yet to see the American movie that tells me why Vincent Cassel is such a big smash in France. Danny Boyle’s confusing direction is all over-the-place (is an ADD-addled mind like Boyle’s really the right one for a tasteful brain teaser?). And the script is beyond preposterous. The sleepy first two-thirds of the movie amble along in an overly light, tension-diffusion way, then dark, melodramatic twists dominate the last third until you’re wondering if you’re even watching the same movie. The final twist doesn’t even make sense, and the final scene (which switches back to light romance) feels staggeringly wrong given what just preceded it.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Casting Dawson as the female lead in a Hitchcockian mind-teaser sounds excellent, and I would love to see a completely different movie that jumps off from that.