Certificate: 15
Running Time: 94 mins
UK Distributor: Warner Bros
WHO’S IN HYPNOTIC?
Ben Affleck, Alice Braga, J.D. Pardo, Hala Finley, Dayo Okeniyi, Jeff Fahey, Jackie Earle Haley, William Fichtner
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Robert Rodriguez (director, writer, producer, cinematographer, editor), Max Borenstein (writer), Guy Botham, Lisa Ellzey, Mark Gill, John Graham and Jeff Robinov (producers), Rebel Rodriguez (composer), Pablo Berron (cinematographer)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
A detective (Affleck) investigates a series of mind-bending crimes…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON HYPNOTIC?
Apparently, filmmaker Robert Rodriguez has been cooking up his latest film Hypnotic for the past twenty years – and honestly, that makes an eerie amount of sense, because the film actually does look and feel like something you would have seen back in 2003.
In particular, I’m talking about that kind of grimy cop thriller that audiences got in the wake of movies like Se7en or The Bone Collector; y’know, ones that had dreary pee-yellow colour palettes and stock lead detective characters with hard-boiled personas and tragic backstories (usually involving a young child in some form). Combine that with an early 2000s sci-fi/psychological concept that tries to do what The Matrix or Memento did, featuring twist upon twist until it’s completely tangled up in itself, and you’ll get a rough idea of what Hypnotic actually is, that being a film that’s clearly twenty years past its prime and stuck in its own loop of ideas to fully work in 2023.
Rodriguez’s film stars Ben Affleck as Danny Rourke, a detective in the city of Austin, Texas who is still grieving over the abduction of his young daughter Minnie (Hala Finley). Immediately after being cleared to return to work, he and his partner Nicks (J.D. Pardo) investigate a tip-off about an imminent bank robbery, which appears to be orchestrated by a mysterious man (William Fichtner) who has the unusual ability to make anyone do or feel anything he tells them to. Rourke tracks down street psychic Diana Cruz (Alice Braga), the woman that called the robbery in, who tells him that the man is a Hypnotic, a person with strong psychic abilities that can distort a person’s perception of reality using triggers and mind control tactics. Since the man also appears to have a connection with his daughter’s abduction, Rourke and Cruz set out to solve the case – only to quickly find that nothing is, of course, as it seems, leading to some startling revelations that cause Rourke to question his entire reality.
In theory, Hypnotic should be a compelling marriage of concept and style, blending together this Inception-like distortion of reality (at one point, the landscape appears to fold in on itself, as it does in Christopher Nolan’s movie) with a gritty crime thriller angle that plays into the mystery elements more than the average mind-bender. However, in actuality, Rodriguez’s film ends up being a bit too much of both, with the concept drowning in so much exposition dialogue that it becomes increasingly hard to keep up with, and the style never quite lending itself enough grit or ambiance to match the incredibly convoluted narrative.
Where it works best in combining both elements is during its first half, when the film appears to settle on a decent tone as well as a compelling enough hook to keep the viewer engaged. The stuff with Affleck’s character is certainly heavy in its amount of routine police procedural conventions (making it more so is the fact that Affleck himself puts in a mostly monotone performance where you’re not sure if he’s trying to do the gruff, world-weary cop archetype, or if he’s just not that invested in the actual script), but to a point you are intrigued enough to see how his story connects with the sci-fi concept, and how it eventually gets resolved.
From the midway point onwards, though, it’s a bombastic minefield of twists and turns that endlessly pile on top of each other and make the whole thing feel more confusing than genuinely unexpected. No spoilers here, obviously, but I will say that whatever twist you might be thinking of in your head, based purely on the other information I’ve given you so far in this review, odds are that it happens in the movie. Not only that, but some of it might even cause you to start wondering if it actually makes any sense, because some of the reveals here rely on characters saying and doing the right things at the right time, while others feel like Rodriguez, who also co-wrote the script with Max Borenstein, simply made stuff up as they went along, pulling new abilities and rules out of thin air just to advance the plot in some way.
It eventually becomes so messy that whatever intrigue you may have gotten from that first half is mostly gone by the time the bigger picture starts to become clearer, and the constant exposition prevents a real entertainment factor from shining through because, while it isn’t necessarily boring, it doesn’t feel all that lively either. Rodriguez has certainly proven himself to be a nifty visual filmmaker in the past, with the unique visuals of Sin City, Alita: Battle Angel, or even his numerous child-orientated flicks like Spy Kids and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, but with Hypnotic he allows too much of the writing to carry the heavy lifting, while the visuals are largely on autopilot and do little to elevate the overly twisty plotting.
If one were to simply look at Hypnotic as a throwback to crime/sci-fi movies from the early 2000s, then it is an intriguing experiment on one’s nostalgia for that era, even if it means remembering similarly mediocre movies of the time like The Recruit, Along Came a Spider and John Woo’s Paycheck, which also starred Ben Affleck. Everything else about it, though, feels like a frustrating waste of potential; this is an interesting concept, one that comes with a number of equally intriguing ideas, but it loses its way as it tries to simply be clever with them rather than actually expand on them in any meaningful way. It comes across as undercooked, as though Rodriguez spent these last twenty years developing the movie by watching a number of movies like Memento, Inception and Se7en, and then taking away the most basic traits of those films without entirely grasping what it was that actually made them resonate with audiences back then and even to this day.
Instead, it’s one of the more mediocre movies of 2003 that somehow wound up in the space-time continuum and landed twenty years into the future instead. It’s sad because, again, Rodriguez did apparently spend a lot of time developing this particular movie, only for it to come out so mediocre and, ironically, meandering enough to put the viewer in a lulling trance.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Hypnotic can’t escape its early-2000s aesthetic and mentality to execute an intriguing concept that blends gritty cop drama and psychological sci-fi nonsense, but lacks a cohesive style to go with its overly twisty and exposition-heavy script.
Hypnotic is showing in cinemas nationwide from Friday 26th May 2023
