In Theaters: April 5th, 2013
Runtime: 1 hour 41 minutes (101 minutes)
Rated R for sexual content, graphic nudity, violence, some grisly images, and language.
It's
A
Super-cool
Entertaining
Flick!
Simon (James McAvoy), a fine art auctioneer, teams up with a criminal gang to steal a Goya painting worth millions of dollars, but after suffering a blow to the head during the heist he awakens to discover he has no memory of where he hid the painting. When physical threats and torture fail to produce answers, the gang’s leader Frank (Vincent Cassel) hires hypnotherapist Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson) to delve into the darkest recesses of Simon’s psyche. As Elizabeth begins to unravel Simon’s broken subconscious, the lines between truth, suggestion, and deceit begin to blur.
Boyle loads his movie with so many snazzy effects that we lose sight of what it all means.
Critic Score: B-
Danny Boyle's trippy, Inception-like thriller is a hypnotic head trip that demands you trust no one.
Critic Score: 3/4
The dreamy unconscious in Trance seems haphazard, frenetic and often meaningless.
Critic Score: 2.5/4
When Boyle finally pulls aside the curtain to show what he's been up to all along, we don't feel as if we've been fairly fooled. We feel as if we've been cheated...
Critic Score: 2/4
A slick heist tale with more twists than sense, this is one movie that ends up outsmarting itself.
Critic Score: 2/5
I floated in and out of states that included suspense, surprise, delight and shock, all of them adding up to steady-state enjoyment.
Mr. Boyle is a flamboyant visual stylist with a punk rocker's delight in anarchic jolts. His is a cinema of attraction and repulsion.
Critic Score: 3/5
Boyle may be sleepwalking - speed-sleepwalking, maybe - through Trance. But he's awake and alive when it comes to knowing what his actors can do.
The movie is never boring or uninteresting, but I viewed it from a detached perspective, unable to become involved because I didn't really care about any of the three main characters.
Critic Score: 2.5/4
Viewers who get hung up on story logic - or prefer movies that feature at least one sympathetic character - will spend much of "Trance"'s 101 minutes gritting their teeth.
Critic Score: 3/4
This exhilarating brain-twister is a nonstop visual, aural and intellectual delight, steeped in movie conventions and yet fizzing with freshness. It's what happens when film noir goes out to a rave.
Critic Score: 3.5/4
A frisky, feisty heist flick with brains and charisma, the movie may make a few errors, but they're forgotten in the blink of an eye thanks to all the twists, turns and close shaves.
Critic Score: 4/5
You get the feeling that Boyle recut the footage so often, and in so many looped combinations, that he began to see links between images that no one in the audience would.
Critic Score: D+
The film plays like something Boyle could kick out in his sleep, all his supercool devices listlessly deployed in service of a mediocre wet dream.
Critic Score: 2/5
Anything goes, which may make all this great fun for the hallucinogenically inclined, but since nothing in these sequences has any lasting consequences, suspense is difficult to amplify.
An insufferable cross between "Inception" and the twisty heist noir of Jean-Pierre Melville, "Trance" is a shapelessly propulsive mess of pop psychology and poor drama.
Critic Score: 3.5/10
It's a kick to see Boyle back in lickety-split genre mode.
Critic Score: 3/5
Superficial pleasures aside, however, the convoluted script jumps and dodges so often, it soon loses the thread of its own story.
Danny Boyle has great and plainly evident fun adding twists and curves and tunnels and endless style to his modern London noir Trance, but he makes so many left turns that the film turns in on itself rather than going anywhere.
©2013 20th Century Fox