The awkward shoehorning of Big, Serious Themes into the pulp premise doesn't help, either. To make matters worse, Boyle ends the whole thing on a sentimental note which doesn't jibe with the nihilist tone of the final act (this is also a common Boyle problem).
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While "Trance" never falls apart, its closing stretch involves several shifts in emotional perspective that the movie doesn't really pull off.
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His career is full of films that are great for the first hour and then devolve into generic blandness (" Sunshine" (2007) and " The Beach" are two of the most obvious examples). Boyle is a sprinter: His movies start out fast and energetic, but can't sustain the pace for too long. It's no coincidence that most iconic moments in Boyle's work - the "Choose life…" monologue from " Trainspotting" (1996), the zombie attacks from " 28 Days Later" - involve the characters running. It has the sort of manic energy that makes Boyle's movies so interesting unfortunately, it also has many of the flaws that make them so frustrating.
While not as visually kaleidoscopic as " Slumdog Millionaire" or " 127 Hours" (2010), "Trance" is still a lot of fun to look at. Shot by Anthony Dod Mantle - who won an Oscar for his work on Boyle's " Slumdog Millionaire" (2008) and has shot all but one of the director's features since " 28 Days Later" (2002) - the movie has all of the hallmarks of a digital-era Danny Boyle flick: hyper-saturated colors, deliberately mismatched angles, and eccentric compositions that disorient the viewer without ever embracing Tony Scott-style abstraction. "Trance"'s major problem is also its selling point: It's a Danny Boyle movie. Its plot plays fast and loose with the audience's sense of the characters, some of whom go from sympathetic to downright scary. Part of what makes "Trance" entertaining - if not especially believable - as narrative is its go-for-broke nihilism. It goes without saying that Simon turns out to be more than just a patsy, and that Elizabeth's motivations go beyond wanting a break from the monotony of treating overeaters and premature ejaculators. Finding the painting means first figuring out what makes Simon tick. She confronts the gang and makes Franck give her an equal share in exchange for retrieving "Witches in the Air." Simon, she says, can't remember what happened to it because of repressed anxieties. It doesn't take long for Elizabeth to figure out that Simon isn't really looking for his lost car keys.
He chooses American expatriate Elizabeth ( Rosario Dawson) because, he says, he likes her name. He hands Simon an iPad ("Trance" is sick with Apple product placement) and lets him pick out a hypnotherapist.
After torture proves ineffective, Franck decides to try a more unorthodox method: hypnosis. The problem, though, is that the knock on the head delivered by Franck has made him lose his memory he can't remember where he hid the painting, or even why he hid it. In a movie that runs largely on outlandish plot twists, it hardly qualifies as a spoiler to reveal that Simon was in on the robbery.