"Trance" and "Now You See Me"

I like mystery films, especially twisty, plotty mysteries that hold back a key piece of the puzzle until the very end, one that usually puts everything else that has transpired into a new perspective. I'm writing about two recent additions to the genre today, Danny Boyle's "Trance" and Louis Leterrier's "Now You See Me," two movies that have practically nothing in common except that they both follow this same kind of basic structure. And their faults, stemming from how they use this structure, are practically the inverse of one another.

Danny Boyle returns to his R-rated crime thriller roots with "Trance," where an art auctioneer, Simon (James McAvoy), participates in the theft of a valuable painting. The painting goes missing after the heist, but Simon can't remember what happened to it, having sustained significant head trauma. To cure the amnesia, his associate in crime, Franck (Vincent Cassel), sends Simon to undergo hypnosis therapy by a therapist named Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson). Both men fall in love with Elizabeth, who has her own agenda.

Because "Trance" unfolds in a fairly straightforward manner, it is dependent on character drama and the mechanics of its twisty plot. Hypnosis is essentially treated like mind control here, and poor Simon's head gets so scrambled, it's a wonder he can walk straight. The actors are all very strong, though, and do a good job of selling the unbelievable. Boyle summons up all kinds of fancy visual tricks to portray the effects of hypnosis too. It is nice to see Danny Boyle doing a bloody, pulpy genre movie again. "Trance" earns its R-rating with a good amount of violence, gore, full frontal nudity, and profanities in abundance. All of the characters are terrible people, and it's a lot of fun watching them screw with each other.

However, a major problem is that while the mystery is interesting, the characters are very thin, which is necessary to some degree because of how the plot functions. For much of the movie, you simply can't know much about Simon or Elizabeth or the story doesn't work. The film gets muddled in its second act as it labors to keep everyone from figuring out the truth about the painting too quickly, and it often feels like it's artificially prolonging the suspense. When the big reveal comes, it's a good one and it satisfies, but it takes some patience a lot of suspension of disbelief to get to that point. I can't help thinking that the film should have been much shorter or that it could have used another subplot or two.

"Now You See Me," on the other hand, has no trouble at all keeping the momentum going. A quartet of magicians, illusionist J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), mentalist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), escape artist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), and street magician Jack Wild (Dave Franco) are recruited by a mysterious benefactor to become The Four Horsemen, a team that utilizes all their combined talents to pull off a series of fantastic, large-scale stunts. When one performance involves them appearing to rob a bank in France from a stage in Las Vegas, the police get involved. The FBI's Agent Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) and Interpol's Agent Dray (Mélanie Laurent) are thrown together to investigate the puzzling crime.

Again, thin characters, but because this is an action flick full of chase sequences and flashy stunts, our enjoyment doesn't really depend on them. All the actors give serviceable performances, including Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman in minor roles, and that's all that's really necessary. The film is eventful enough and inventive enough in the way it handles each new bit of magical mayhem that it breezes through most of the running time. The major weak point is Ruffalo and Laurent's characters, who get the clunkiest expository dialogue and don't connect the way they need to. Laurent in particular is saddled by a near-impenetrable accent and an especially underwritten part.

And then comes the ending, where it all falls to pieces. I enjoyed the first 80% of "Now You See Me," and then comes the big reveal, which does everything wrong. It's not set up well at all. It feels completely arbitrary, like someone simply picked the final mastermind's name out of a hat. It undermines a lot of the story and is logically unsound. And frankly, it cheats. I find it's a very bad sign where immediately after seeing a film my first instinct is to figure out where the story went wrong and how it could have been corrected. "Trance" may have exaggerated what hypnosis is actually capable of, but it played fair by its own rules. "Now You See Me" doesn't.

So "Trance" comes out well ahead of "Now You See Me" in the final tally for executing its basic premise better, but I'm actually looking forward to the announced "Now You See Me" sequel. The movie didn't do much with the most interesting characters, and I think it has a good shot at metamorphosing into something like the "Fast & Furious" franchise, except with magic acts instead of car racing. And it wouldn't be hard at all to improve on the first movie.
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