BEFORE: Snapping back to modern times, but with James McAvoy carrying over from "The Conspirator". Crime's been a semi-constant theme here for the past few weeks, and it looks like "art" is going to be a recurring theme for the year as well. The two themes come together in a film about an art robbery - sort of like how they came together in "The Monuments Men".
THE PLOT: An art auctioneer who has become mixed up with a group of criminals partners with a hypnotherapist in order to recover a lost painting.
AFTER: Once in a while, I land on a film that ties together a bunch of themes - things I've seen over and over, making similar points but connecting them in a new way, and it just makes me feel like I'm on the right track. And every indication I got from the first half of this film made me feel that way. There's a heist ("Gone in 60 Seconds", "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot"), hypnotherapy ("Shrink", "Prime"), and even torture ("Syriana", "Prisoners"). Plus a fair amount of sex ("Henry & June", "In the Cut") and a gambling debt ("Rounders").
There's a great set-up here, one of the best I've ever seen. The heist itself is great, well-executed, calling to mind something out of "The Thomas Crown Affair" - with one twist that you'll probably see coming, and another one that you probably won't. When all is said and done, the man who knows where the painting is gets hit on the head and can't remember its location. Is that a contrivance? Sure it is, but once the gang decides to find the answer inside his brain with the help of hypnosis, that's just contrived enough to perhaps be believable. Damn, I was desperate to find out where the painting was - I wanted to see the end of THAT movie.
But the movie then got caught up in so many other things - and little inconsistencies started to pop up, like the elements in "Jacob's Ladder" that didn't make sense, which made me start to wonder what was really going on here. After all, once you open that hypnosis door, you allow the possibility to creep in that maybe things aren't really what they seem. Maybe you're in the dreamscape, at least for some of the scenes, or taking a spin through a character's memory. And then if some things aren't real, then you end up with the kind of movie that someone wanted to make because "Inception" made so much money a few years before, and they wanted to get a similar movie out there in the marketplace.
Who's really in control of the gang? Who had the idea to steal the painting in the first place? Is everyone even really who they say they are? Can anyone's memory be trusted, or are some people living out hypnotic suggestions? But unlike some films that get tricky with this stuff, which practically demand a second viewing right after the first one, all of these questions and concerns just made things way too complicated, and I wanted the story to end so I could be done with it.
Obviously I don't want to reveal here what was really going on, but I'll maintain that if you load up a narrative with so many different possibilities, the result could be a film that's so much about everything that it ends up being about nothing. This was directed by Danny Boyle, who also directed "Slumdog Millionaire", and I could make the case that the structure that worked for that film so brilliantly - a game show contestant has flashbacks that allow him to answer questions correctly - doesn't work here, as a man tries to trigger memories that will give him the location of the painting.
Also starring Rosario Dawson (last seen in "25th Hour"), Vincent Cassel (last seen in "A Dangerous Method"), Danny Sapani, Matt Cross.
RATING: 5 out of 10 hired Ukrainians
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