Trance Reviews
Top CriticTrance is to Danny Boyle more or less as Side Effects was to Steven Soderbergh: an arty spin on a trashy B-movie, engineered to showcase the director's particular gifts.
Dawson walks through this film with majestic confidence while McAvoy is constantly inches from a full breakdown. And Boyle keeps that tension mesmerizing.
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| Original Score: B
I came away wondering whether the headache I left the theater with was such a bad -- or even unintentional -- thing after all.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The plot of Trance is purposely convoluted - you're supposed to get more and more confused as the story unfolds, not always sure if what you're watching is a dream.
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| Original Score: 2/4
[Boyle] leaves it to the audience to try to figure out just what's up, and what's going down, in this sleek psychological puzzler.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It's an ingeniously built automaton, sexy as hell, and devoid of a heart.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
If you're going to champion style over substance, you'll want Danny Boyle providing the style.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
With "Trance," story becomes just another element in Boyle's commercial pop-Cubism, and the results are nearly fatal.
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| Original Score: 2/4
For much of the film ... Boyle's innate flair as a dramatist and conjurer keeps one clamped to the armrests.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Boyle is telling us a story of a perfect crime gone awry. But like his protagonist, he's really shifty about it.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Danny Boyle seems to have had a blast making Trance. It's a pity he makes it so difficult to share in his joy.
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| Original Score: 2/4
For a while, "Trance" had me guessing, and more or less hooked. Then the violence, motivations, double-crosses and fantasy/reality tangles became tedious.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The only perceptible purpose of the story is to pay homage to Dawson, and rightly so; her character is a rare blend of she-devil and sculptured deity, rising above the follies of mere men.
Boyle loads his movie with so many snazzy effects that we lose sight of what it all means.
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| Original Score: B-
I can't remember the last time I had this much fun having the rug pulled out from under me.
Danny Boyle's trippy, Inception-like thriller is a hypnotic head trip that demands you trust no one.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The dreamy unconscious in Trance seems haphazard, frenetic and often meaningless.
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| Original 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 ...
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| Original Score: 2/4
A slick heist tale with more twists than sense, this is one movie that ends up outsmarting itself.
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| Original 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.
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| Original 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.
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| Original 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.
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| Original 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.
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| Original 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.
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| Original 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.
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| Original 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.
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| Original 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.
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| Original Score: 3.5/10
It's a kick to see Boyle back in lickety-split genre mode.
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| Original 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.
