Director Danny Boyle, after winning accolades for 127 Hours and Oscars for Slumdog Millionaire, turns to mind games with his latest film. Trance opens masterfully as an ironic art heist caper with a twist of amnesia. It turns serious soon enough, becoming a head-scratcher whose many twists and turns promise intrigue but end in a blind alley where Vanilla Sky rear-ends Inception.
About that beginning: In a nod toward Sunset Boulevard, Trance opens with a cheeky narration of its hapless protagonist Simon (James McAvoy), an art dealer at a posh London auction house who arranges the theft of Goya's Witches in the Air. Edited with the economy and precision of a good music video (and set to a pulse-pounding techno rock beat), the robbery is exciting to watch and introduces the first puzzle: Why does Simon bungle the job? With the robbery in progress, he suddenly strikes out at his partner, the hardened criminal Franck (Vincent Cassel), who responds by clubbing him with a rifle butt. Simon awakens with no memory of what happened to the Goya, which mysteriously disappeared before it reached the criminals' lair. Franck is convinced that Simon somehow kept it for himself.
Boyle shifts easily between visual textures (from full color digital to grainy surveillance video) and emotional moods. Bleeding after being tortured, Simon is slumped in the corner of Franck's lair as the gang members eat Chinese takeout with chopsticks. Finally convincing them that he can't recall where the Goya went, Simon is sent by the gang to a beautiful hypnotist, Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson), who promises to unlock the chamber where his memory is kept. But she decides she wants a piece of the Goya, becoming an equal partner in crime.
So far, so good—and then come the head games, the “who-is-putting-who-on?” half of the film. Visually, Boyle captures the labyrinth of the mind in scenes of mirrored reflections through off-kilter cameras, and in one moment conjures a grotesque image worthy of Goya. Witches in the Air hovers above the action, a mysterious allegory for the darkness of the human imagination that Boyle's story wants to penetrate. Nevertheless, we are left with the feeling that the exercise wasn't time well spent.
Home Movies/Out on Digital
"Liberace: The Ultimate Entertainer"
With a twinkle in his eyes, Liberace hosted his own TV variety show for many years. This two-disc best-of collection excerpts segments from the show's later, in-color era; the glitter-garbed entertainer was at his grand piano with its candelabra when he wasn't engaged in humorous banter with guests or acting in song-and-dance routines. Liberace took as much apparent delight in preening as in running his fluid fingers across the ivories.
Storage 24
Something is afoot in London. Cell phones are down and a squabbling circle of 20-somethings are trapped in a dingy storage facility after the security shutters close. And something else is trapped with them in the dingy corridors. Storage 24 includes some clever visuals but is most frightening in those tense moments of anticipation when something is about to happen—but no one knows what.
The Sweeney
Caught between internal affairs on one end and dangerous criminals on the other, London’s elite gangbuster squad stop at almost nothing in this shoot ’em up, chase ’em down action picture. The plot is gritty and predictable, but lifting it above the ordinary is a blustering performance by Ray Winstone as the squad’s chief—a man who long ago lost all illusions.
