IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Released: 11th May
Seen: 6th October
Robert Rodriguez is a fascinating creative force that’s been a mainstay in pop culture ever since the 90s. For over 30 years now he has been one of the few true auteur directors, a man who has his fingers in every element of the filmmaking process and making magic out of extremely low budgets. With films like From Dusk Till Dawn, Sin City, and the Spy Kids franchise under his belt, Robert Rodriguez’s name alone is enough to get people excited to see what he’s going to do. You would’ve thought his name attached to a Ben Affleck action film would’ve been something of a slam dunk, a creative director and one of the few true superstars of modern cinema together feels like it should be a combination designed for greatness… As it is, Hypnotic is just pretty OK.
Hypnotic follows a police officer, Danny Rourke (Ben Affleck) who is still barely dealing with the trauma around the abduction of his child three years ago. Of course, he still wants to do his job and so he’s on his usual beat when a call comes in about a bank robbery that’s going to happen later that day so Danny and his partner Nicks (J. D. Pardo) go to investigate. Once there it becomes apparent that not only is the bank heist being led by a mysterious man named Dellrayne (William Fichtner) but the heist itself is being done through some form of hypnosis, powerful enough to make people willing to kill themselves in order to complete the mission. Danny soon learns that the heist was designed to steal a photo of his missing daughter, which leads Danny on a path filled with mystery, betrayal, and a lot more strange hypnosis battles.
In terms of concepts, “Bank robber that uses hypnosis” is a strangely fascinating one that allows for a lot of fun set pieces to happen. There’s something kind of disturbing about someone who is so overwhelmingly intent on fulfilling a suggestion they were given under hypnosis that they will do great harm to themselves without a second thought, which happens a few times throughout Hypnotic. It’s an idea that’s worked several times before, think of things like the kids in Village of the Damned or Killgrave in the Jessica Jones series where the main antagonist can just give a simple command and it’s done without a second thought. It’s something that works for about the first half hour of Hypnotic it works pretty well here, especially during the actual bank robbery scene.
However, the longer Hypnotic goes on, the less impactful the idea becomes because of one kind of annoying flaw and that’s just how much it overcomplicates things. The overcomplicating starts small, characters giving lengthy descriptions about how the hypnosis works and why certain people are immune. These descriptions take several minutes and drag on so long that it’s just dull, and in the end just completely pointless. We all get how hypnosis works and Hypnotic pretty effectively explains how this specific brand of it works in the opening sequence where we see several people fall under this strange spell, over explaining it just robs it of its power… and this is before Hypnotic does its big twist at the halfway point which, while an interesting choice, also makes Hypnotic even more complicated than it needed to be. It doesn’t help that by the time they reveal the big twist, Hypnotic has gone off the rails enough that it’d be easy for a casual viewer to just abandon the entire trip.
Of course, if you do happen to be able to keep following everything that’s going on, should the duller moments not throw you off, there are a few genuinely interesting moments that show off the potential of the concept. There are some really fun action set pieces that take full advantage of the concept of people being hypnotized to act like kamikaze pilots, more than a few fantastic shots that play with your understanding of reality or are just so weirdly lit that it’s fun to look at them (why is a hotel room randomly lit in red and blue light? Who knows, but it looks fucking cool) and enough interesting ideas in the second half to make an entire franchise out of… of course, it has so many ideas that every character needs to carefully explain every single one of them so the audience can follow, the entire climax requires Ben Affleck standing around for several minutes with a stupid grin on his face detailing what just happened, but it’s still some cool ideas.
Hypnotic has got a lot of slow dull moments of exposition and pointlessness that keeps it from being as fun as it could be, but there’s still something interesting here that’s worth looking at. At least the first third of the movie has a lot of potential, enjoyable action scenes and a fun concept that they fumble with a little more as Hypnotic goes on but there’s at least something interesting going on the whole time. It’s nowhere near Rodriguez’s best work, but it’s hard to deny that it’s still at least got enough interesting ideas to maybe look at if it’s on sale somewhere. It feels like Hypnotic just needed another couple of script revisions and it might’ve been something special, as it is, it’s just kind of fine.
Movie Meister Reviews 