10 Movies That Thought They Were Smart (But Really Weren't)

4. Trance

In the shadow of Christopher Nolan's Inception, a number of movies tried their own hand at crafting intelligent, intricately crafted existential thrillers, which visualised concepts of the mind in unexpected, inventive ways. One of the more notable efforts is Danny Boyle's Trance, which follows an art auctioneer, Simon (James McAvoy), who gets involved with a heist in his own auction house, and when he can't seem to remember the location of the stolen painting, his gangster cohort Franck (Vincent Cassel) hires a hypnotherapist named Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson) to try and retrieve the repressed information from Simon's mind. It's a tricky premise but one that's promisingly introduced by Boyle, even to viewers who might be skeptical of the practice of hypnotism. The main pull of the movie is in not knowing who truly is in control, until we discover that Elizabeth is playing both sides against each other, using her intelligence and sexuality to ensnare the pair. This would have been sufficient enough, but the script begins to strain credibility and interest as it layers upon plot twist after plot twist under the pretense of being clever, when really it's just trying to be too clever for its own good. The revelation that Simon was Elizabeth's abusive ex prior to the events of the movie is certainly compelling, though by the time the ridiculous finale rolls around, in which Elizabeth slams a truck into both Simon and Franck (the latter of whom is tied up inside a car) and sends them plummeting into a river, Trance has very much flung itself gleefully off its own rails and become too silly to truly consider intelligent. Even more revelations abound after that, and though the movie's final scene does raise a compelling dilemma for Franck (to allow himself to be hypnotised one final time, apparently to forget the whole incident, or not), the movie simply layers on too much too thick to be taken seriously, even though it clearly wants to be.