It’s time to continue to put further effort into these
reviews than is really advisable as I look back into another director’s work
who has a new release coming out soon. This time around, it’s Danny Boyle, a
man is kind of frustratingly difficult to pin down in terms of an overall
style. He has a very kitchen sink approach to his craft, something usually
reserved for filmmakers on substantially tinier budgets: If it looks cool, use
it! Not to say that he doesn’t come up with some amazing visual ideas for his
films, like the absolute grime of Trainspotting, the video camera stock that
almost looks like a TV news reel in 28 Days Later or even the hectic video game
aesthetic adopted for certain scenes in The Beach. It’s just that the man just
has so many ideas for how to present
a story on film that it’s hard to pin down if he's a true original or just
derivative; he’s like Ant from Atmosphere. Still, considering this is
the same guy who gave us not only one of the best zombie films of all time but
also easily one of the better Christian-oriented films with Millions, you’re
usually gonna get quality work from the guy. Usually.
The plot: Art auctioneer Simon (James McAvoy) gets mixed up
with a group of art thieves lead by Franck (Vincent Cassel) after an attempted
robbery of a valuable painting goes awry, one that Simon was meant to help push
through. As a result, the painting has gone missing and Simon, the only person
with any knowledge about where it is, has completely forgotten its location. To
assist them in this effort, they enlist the help of hypnotherapist Elizabeth
(Rosario Dawson) to tap into his subconscious to get the information they need.
In the releases just prior to this film, Boyle had started
to fully embrace his position as a more prestige director, delivering such
lauded works as Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours. However, this time around,
it seems like he had a sudden want to go back to his roots: He brought in his
old collaborator John Hodge, whom he last worked with over a decade earlier
with The Beach, and got McAvoy as his lead who is pretty much a younger version
of former Boyle go-to actor Ewan McGregor. He also seems to have gone back to
his recklessly stylistic approach, as opposed to the weird-way point he
previously occupied between that and the traditional Oscar crowd-pleasers. As
such, this is a very slick looking film that has a real fixation on lens flares
and technicolor lighting. Given how we’re dealing with a film that deals with
hypnotherapy and screwing with people’s memories, this does give a sufficient,
for lack of a better term, trance-like quality to the film that at least fits
the tone of the film.
This script, originally written by Joe Ahearne, has been
kicking around the Boyle camp since the days of Shallow Grave, being turned
into a TV movie in 2001 and then getting doctored by Hodge to be made into a
feature film with Boyle as was first intended. Just so we’re clear, that means
that this is a psychological thriller from the mid-90’s… oh my word, does it
feel like a relic of the era. Don’t get me wrong, the film has a definitely
promising start with an intriguing premise and some good possibilities for
psycho-drama. This is helped by McAvoy, Dawson and Cassel doing very well in
their roles: McAvoy feels like a mental Rubix cube that could blow up once it’s
solved, Cassel goes beyond just being your standard hardened British gangster
and actually shows some real humanity to him and Dawson is good at the numerous
chess pieces that she ends up assuming as the film carries on.
Unfortunately, once the second act kicks in, the cracks in
the film’s understanding of human psychology start to show and only widen the
further they go. We end up getting a love triangle between the three main
characters, the explanations for which don’t add up in terms of how McAvoy fits
into all of it. Without getting into spoiler territory too heavily, I’ll just
say that the initial realisation of this requires a basic misunderstanding of
how reverse psychology works. This isn’t helped by how the film only ends up
being proved correct by its own logic later on, which is not how smart film
made. It’s also kind of confounding that, in a film all about hypnosis and the
power of mental suggestion, the film doesn’t acknowledge one of the most
crucial aspects of the practice: Susceptibility. In order for any form of
hypnosis to work, the recipient has to be open to the idea of suggestion; it’s
the main reason why stage hypnotists ask for open volunteers for their act.
Here, again without getting too explicit with spoilers, all of these
suggestions made on behalf of others don’t make sense because there is no way that these characters would agree
to them. Okay, tell a lie, there is one
scene where this is shown when the art thieves are put under a trance and only
one of them actually feels the effects of it while the others just giggle their
way through it. Would’ve been nice when it wasn’t just ignored for the rest of
the film, though.
More so than its retro attitudes to psycho-drama, where this
film really drops the ball is in its approach to psycho-thrills. I specified the beginning of the second act earlier because
that is when the first of the many, many
plot twists are introduced; once they start, they never cease for the rest of
the film. Much like Before I Go To Sleep, the story is too focused on throwing
off the audience and not focused enough on making coherent sense as a story.
What makes this even worse is that it’s even along the same lines as BIGTS in
terms of its twists: It keeps going back and forth in terms of which character
has what motive, to the point where the film has pretty much shown every conceivable
result but won’t tell the audience which one is the “right” one until the very
end. It’s like reading a choose your own adventure book from cover to cover in
page order; you’ll see every possible outcome, but that doesn’t mean it will
make narrative sense. This is also helped by how, after a while, you start to
anticipate what would normally be stupid plot decisions once you realise that
this film isn’t all that smart to begin with. For all of its attempts to
erratically shift the plot’s gears to keep the audience on their toes, there is
a definite pattern to its actions which make the surprises hit with less and
less impact as they come.
All in all, while I definitely give credit for the
production design, the direction and the effort made by the cast, this
so-called ‘thriller’ relies so heavily on the same bag of tricks that, before
too long, it stops being shocking and starts to become a little suspicious. It
doesn’t help that it progressively gets sillier and sillier, leading up to a
finale that would probably be laughed at even during the 80’s-90’s when this
brand of psychological film was starting to make its mark. I wouldn’t call this
the absolute weakest of Boyle’s filmography, as this still has more of a head
on its shoulders than A Life Less Ordinary, but it is a far cry from the man’s
best.
No comments:
Post a Comment