Remember 90’s Robert Rodriguez? The guy who banged out unfeasibly entertaining genre fare on his own terms thanks to his indefatigable indie spirit and the fact he did virtually every job on set himself aside from sweeping up after a long day’s filming – although I’m willing to bet he probably did that too. However, these days, the impossibly hard working director seems to have faltered somewhat with age after various Netflix based kids films and a sub-par return to Sin City – oh sure, Alita: Battle Angel has its fans, but I personally was hoping that a merger of Rodriguez and James Cameron would offer something a bit more focused.
Anyway, seemingly out of nowhere comes Hypnotic, a reality warping thriller that features Ben Affleck trying to make sense of an ever-changing plot that puts us in the shoes of our baffled lead – and by that I mean you’ll have no frickin’ clue as to what the hell is going on.
Danny Rourke is a detective operating in Austin who is undergoing therapy after his daughter went missing four years earlier, but his attention is torn away from charismatic brooding when he stumbles upon the latest of a string of bank robberies that have been apparently perpetrated by people on the inside who suddenly felt the need to rob the place for the contents of a single safety deposit box. Finding himself in the middle of one of these heists, Danny witnesses a mysterious man who seemingly has the ability to make the impossible happen with but the slightest glance. While unable to apprehend this dude who can order cops to shoot each other with a word and can dive of the side of a building and disappear without a trace, Danny still manages to get to what he was looking for before he could, which turns out to be a Polaroid of his missing daughter along with the cryptic message “Find Lev Dellrayne” written on it.
Emboldened with the fruits of a paranoid conspiracy theory, Danny manages to seek out fortuneteller Diana Cruz who tells him that Lev Dellrayne is, in fact, the name of the mystery drenched man who got away and both he and Cruz are both “Hynotics”, powerful hypnotists trained by the government to control minds and who subsequently escaped the shadowy, secret Divison.
From here, things start to get really screwy, as virtually everything Danny has assumed to be true is peeled back after a merciless succession of reality-humping rug pulls. What does the kidnapping of Danny’s daughter have to do with everything thing that’s going on, and if hypnotic are able to make you believe anything, how does he know if anything he’s experiencing is really real?
Starting with the type of head scratching plot usually deployed by a Christopher Nolan summer blockbuster and featuring a missing kid back story for its frowning lead that feels worrying familiar to Minority Report, it’s obvious that Rodriguez is willing to stand on the shoulders of giants in order to get his tale (first penned back in 2002) off the ground, however, as the impressively convoluted plot gathers steam and starts adding shifty government programmes into the mix it starts to resemble Stephen King’s Firestarter instead. However, while all the examples I’ve just mentioned took pains to make sure that their concepts are explained nice and clearly in order for audiences to get their noggins around vastly complicated scenarios inbetween crunching their way through handfuls of popcorn and its here that the cracks in Hypnotic’s reality start to show.
It’s somewhat tough to expect an audience to embrace your world of mind rattling hypnotics and multiple layers of earth shattering reveals when it feels like your screenwriters and director don’t have a solid grasp of what makes the movie tick. For a start, the movie can’t seem to settle on what a Hypnotic actually is, first suggesting that their abilities come from a heightened talent to do what Derrin Brown does but in a fraction of the time, using eye contact, trigger phrases and visual prompts to turn a target’s mind into easily malleable mush. However, around the halfway point, you get the sense that Rodriguez might not actually know what the difference between a hypnotist and telepath is and soon the preposterous, Now You See Me-style antics drift into full blown Professor X territory. Don’t believe me? Explain to me then the movie’s conviction that if two hypnotics were to have a baby, it would be all-powerful child, able to brain-jack people at will with a glance? Or the fact when two Hypnotic’s start dueling, they show visible strain on their faces even though they’re supposed to be using nothing more than weaponized suggestion. Pretty much sounds like telepathy to me…
In the movie’s defence, maybe the distinction was made somewhere and I just didn’t catch it, but the film is so muddled and contradictory to it’s own rules that’s it’s tough to keep straight what the actual rules are as they get irretrievably lost among the roar of endless rug pulls. Eventually, much like one of the Hypnotic’s victims, you just eventually succumb to the dizzying noise and settle into a glassy-eyed haze.
It’s a shame because at times, Hypnotic is so irresponsibly convoluted, it veers into so-bad-it’s-good territory and if you treat all the outlandish revelations the same way you were supposed to treat all the over the top moments from Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn and Machete, it proves to be quite the unintended giggle. You get the feeling Rodriguez was hoping a Hitchcock meets Nolan aesthetic and one scene featuring Danny trying to keep track of a pair of scissors after receiving a suggestion to murder someone almost manages to achieve it – but instead Hypnotic feels more like a Raising Cain-era Brian De Palma trying to juggle a labyrinthisn plot after having his drink spiked with rohypnol.
Ben Affleck (learning nothing from John Woo’s Paycheck) remains locked steadfastly into his Sad Affleck meme for the majority of the show, but the usually dependable Alice Braga admirably does the heavy lifting, explaining the ever changing rules with exposition that may be out of date as soon as the very next scene. However, it’s truly awesome to seen the marvelously reptilian William Fichtner fixing everyone around him with that dead-eyed glare and even deader tone of voice in a major movie role – it’s been far too long since I saw him thousand-yard-stare his way through a thriller and I’m glad he’s here.
All in all, it’s a something of a depressing result for Rodriguez, who exploded onto the 90’s scene with his boundless innovation and inventiveness and energised his work with the crazy flair of an exploitation flick. However, here he seems to have noticably lost his mojo, knocking out a twisty thriller so sloppy, you’ll be appropriately hypnotized into a catatonic daze.
Come on Rob; snap out of it.
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