Review of Trance (2013) by Ducknation — 21 May 2014

"Do you want to remember or do you want to forget?".

Coming from Danny Boyle I was expecting a lot then this, Trance tries to be like Inception with the psychological thriller feel but the end result isn't up to par with his previous films. The cast was a big selling point for me as James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson, and Vincent Cassel are all great actors and they all ended up doing solid performances, actually I thought that James McAvoy did a superb job maybe the best iv'e seen of him. Trance story gets messy at times when it comes to the psychological part whereas Inception's keeps a smooth flow throughout.

The film follows Simon (James McAvoy) a fine art auctioneer with a huge gambling problem, he soon becomes in deep in debt with many people and the only way to pay them off is to trade his debt for a very rich painting to a gang leader. On the day of the auction Simon double-crosses the gang resulting in the gang leader Franck (Vincent Cassel) hitting him over the head with a shotgun causing him to have amnesia. From here the psychological feel takes on a heavy role in the film as the gang takes Simon to go see a hypnotist Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson) She dissects his mind to make him remember where he put the painting. This happens multiple times taking a psychological tole on Simon to a point to where he doesn't know what's real and what's not.

The pace of the film was also something I didn't like the beginning starts out nice then slows down after that the pace only picks it up for short segments then goes back to slowing down. All this was fine but once they got into the car heading for the painting at the end of the film and Elizabeth is explaining to Simon what really went on, in that really long dawn out scene that we all seen coming anyways, it was just a complete bore to me and I couldn't wait for it to be over. The very last sentence in the movie is Elizabeth saying Do you want to remember or do you want to forget? and the first thing that popped up into my head was forget this disappointing movie.

Overall I give it a 6.0 Oh yeah I totally forgot that Rosario Dawson went fully nude in this, I do have to say it was quite nice.