Director: Robert Rodriguez
Writers: Robert Rodriguez and Max Borenstein
Stars: Ben Affleck, Alice Braga, William Fichtner
Synopsis: A detective investigates a mystery involving his missing daughter and a secret government program.
When you read the synopsis of Hypnotic, it seems like a throwback to the sci-fi conspiracy thrillers of 25 years ago. It’s got all the elements of studio catnip before studios became IP factories. It’s got a big star in Ben Affleck and a cool director in Robert Rodriguez. Hypnotic could have heralded a return to wide releases for original films.
Instead, Hypnotic is a needlessly convoluted Inception clone, with no style at all. It’s like Rodriguez and co-writer Max Borenstein saw a few Christopher Nolan films and said, “we could do that.” Some of the extremely cliched dialogue can be explained away by one of the too many twists in the film, but it’s more like they just went with the first draft because they had the greenlight from Rodriguez’s name alone.
A lot of the film, indeed, feels like a first draft. The music sounds like it was either cribbed from the library of a failed police procedural or just the sample tracks from a 2003 copy of Apple’s Garageband. The dreaded Division’s uniform is simply red blazers. The special effects of hypnosis are mostly wavy lines around people’s heads.
Honestly, if you added a laugh track and inserted a few shots of Saturday Night Live cast members reacting to the logorrhea of exposition that spills out of Diana’s (Alice Braga) mouth it would be a pretty good parody. Hypnotic isn’t fun bad, it’s boring bad. Bad doesn’t mean entirely poorly made, either. It just means that the best effort wasn’t put forward.
There are filmmakers that can pull off doing many jobs on the same film. Robert Rodriguez would have benefitted from many more department heads. He’s a competent editor and cinematographer. Some of the sequences do have suspense by the mere virtueof being well cut. Many shots are dynamic and unique to Rodriguez’s style, especially as Rourke ( Affleck) is realizing he’s been manipulated. But his want to and clout that lets him do everything means that there was no one to question or at least comment on certain decisions.
Hypnotic is a failure as a film for a myriad of reasons. Ben Affleck doesn’t help it at all. He’s pretty much on autopilot, waiting for his next five minute cameo in a DCEU movie. He’s an actor that used to get by on his charm and here he’s something far less than charming. His lack of energy brings the whole film down. Alice Braga and William Fichtner can’t save it either. She’s an exposition machine and he’s the antagonist’s stand in.
This film may make a little money. Some from the curious, but mostly when its streaming rights get sold and it haunts the back catalogs of Crackle, Tubi, or Pluto TV. It’s the rare summer wide release outlier. Unlike most of those, Hypnotic just isn’t worth your time. Instead, seek out Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s enigmatic, darkly funny, and disturbing Cure from 1997. A film which Hypnotic’s filmmakers wish it could be.
