'Hypnotic' Review: Good On The Page, Not On The Stage
Inception did it better.
Ben Affleck in Hypnotic. Courtesy of Ketchup Entertainment.
Auteur: a filmmaker whose personal influence and artistic control over a movie are so great that the filmmaker is regarded as the author of the movie. Generally, it’s a good thing when a film has an auteur, and many of history’s greatest motion pictures are crafted by individuals that leave their individuality all over it. As I said, it’s generally good unless it feels like said auteur hasn’t been on the internet in over a decade. This brings us to Hypnotic, a movie that, in essentially every way, feels like it was made in the late 2000s and is just as dated. In this case, our auteur is Robert Rodriguez, the man behind Spy Kids and Sharkboy & Lavagirl. While it doesn’t necessarily feel like Rodriguez wrote the film, as the credits will tell you, the multi-hyphenate was so involved in each part of the film’s processes, that, if anything, Hypnotic feels inherently like a Robert Rodriguez film in its tone, story, and the forced resolution it’s given that feels directly taken from Rodriguez’s previous works.
Ben Affleck & Alice Braga in Hypnotic. Courtesy of Ketchup Entertainment.
The film follows Danny Rourke (Ben Affleck), a Texas cop who, due to an unfortunate event, is looking for his kidnapped daughter. We pick up with Danny during a therapy session that abruptly ends when he gets a text from Nicks (JD Pardo of Mayans M.C.) alerting him to a bank heist. Once this next sequence begins, we’re treated to the film’s first major chunk of exposition, something that happens too heavily too often, not leaving a single aspect of the film’s story up to the viewers’ imaginations. As Danny attempts to foil the bank heist, he finds what they’re looking for — a postcard of Danny’s daughter with a name on it. What’s interesting about this, however, is that Nicks was tipped off, so, as one does, Danny looks for the source of the tip, leading him to Diana (Alice Braga). Unfortunately for Danny, what Diana tells him is certainly not what he was looking for, sending the film’s plot in a completely different direction than one would expect from the previous bits of information.
After Hypnotic ended, I thought of two movies in particular, for a number of reasons. Inception (directed by Christopher Nolan) and Shutter Island (directed by Martin Scorsese) both have clear heavy influences on Hypnotic, with some aspects of the film feeling directly sampled from them, as a musician takes pieces from another song to construct something new. In this case, however, the general feeling regarding the connection between these three films is that the two predecessors executed their concepts better, especially given how Hypnotic navigates its story once the dots are connected. The film disregards the more intriguing aspects of its story to take the “non-Nolan” way out (you’ll get what I mean, just trying to avoid spoilers).
Director Robert Rodriguez on the set of Hypnotic. Courtesy of Ketchup Entertainment.
If anything, Hypnotic (at times) feels confusing. Not because the plot is necessarily dense, but because of the logic it uses (there’s a clear standout in the first 10 minutes that bugged me for the entire film’s runtime) or how dated it feels because we’ve seen this all before, and there are no real new ideas being presented. On paper, Hypnotic (or most of it) actually seems like a solid premise. While it takes a concept we’ve seen, it sometimes tries to add something new and does thrive in moments of prolonged, purposeful confusion and tension, which work particularly well because of how fast-paced most of the film is. Hypnotic is additionally dragged down by the one-note performances, particularly by Ben Affleck in the lead role, who completely phones this in. While Affleck is in the movie, it doesn’t truly feel like he’s in the movie. Outside of Affleck, there’s no real room for anyone else to be given the chance to stand out, due to the nature of the film’s structure.
Look, I can compare Hypnotic to Inception and Tenet all day, but that will eventually get boring. Quite simply, the film’s biggest problem is that it takes concepts from films that it wants to be —inviting the endless, inevitable comparisons— but doesn’t pull them off as well. I can keep rattling off the list of movies that Hypnotic isn’t, but that will likely just make you want to go watch one of those instead. One thing I can say about Hypnotic is that while it takes the basic conceptual framework of these movies, it does evolve upon them in an interesting manner, one that made me think, “Huh, that’s actually pretty cool.” It’s just unfortunate that the film’s execution didn’t match its potential. The bottom line is this: if you’re looking for a perfectly okay way to spend a brisk 90 minutes and get a list of movies to go watch at home, go see Hypnotic. There isn’t much more to say than that. Maybe if this movie did come out in the late 2000s, it’d impress me.
Hypnotic arrives in theaters on May 12.
This review was made possible thanks to Ketchup Entertainment who invited us to a preview screening of Hypnotic for our review consideration.
