The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D
Hypnotic, a new film from director Robert Rodriguez, is just a mess. In a way, though, it’s an intriguing mess. This film starts as a fairly entertaining cop thriller and then goes off the frigging rails with so many plot twists that I couldn’t remember how the movie started by the time I was watching the last act. Hypnotic seems like it couldn’t decide which movie’s plot twist it wanted to rip off, so it ripped off all of the plot twists. The final result is kind of baffling, as the film is somehow both irritatingly predictable and completely dumbfounding at the same time. That shouldn’t be possible.
As a quick aside, you may be wondering why you haven’t heard of this movie considering that it’s directed by Robert Rodriguez, stars Ben Affleck and is playing in over 2,000 theaters. Glad you asked. Hypnotic was filmed two years ago (and written way back in 2002) and was supposed to be released by a company called Solstice Studios. However, Solstice Studios went bankrupt before the film was released. In the meantime, the producers pre-sold the film to foreign distributors, but the pre-sales came with the caveat that the film had to be released theatrically in the United States in at least 2,000 theaters. None of the major studios were interested in picking up the movie, so a no-name company called Ketchup Entertainment picked it up. Ketchup Entertainment had just enough money to provide the required theatrical release, but by “just enough money,” I mean that they didn’t have any additional money for marketing. So Hypnotic’s release is literally just a contractual obligation. That’s why I never saw a trailer for this thing and had never even heard of it before I checked the theater listings that week.
After watching the film, it’s no mystery why none of the major studios wanted to touch it. Ben Affleck stars as a cop that is trying to get over the kidnapping of his daughter. Meanwhile, there is a string of robberies being committed by a man, played by William Fichtner, that seemingly has psychic powers. Fichtner is able to get people to do whatever he wants through the power of suggestion, thus enabling him to recruit unwilling accomplices to assist with the robberies. The prospect of summarizing the rest of the plot is giving me a headache, so I am just going to stop there.
For the first half hour or so, Hypnotic is an entertaining supernatural cop thriller in the vein of something like Solace or The First Power/Fallen (which I’m grouping together because they are basically the same movie). I could get behind a movie like that with Ben Affleck chasing William Fichtner. But man, that plot is only the tip of the iceberg as it goes through a series of plot twists that continue to the point that it starts feeling like self-parody. I was initially annoyed because the plot twists are too obvious (if you also think it odd that two white people would have a Mexican-looking daughter, then you will be several steps ahead of the movie), but the issue of predictability goes away as the film simply can’t decide what it wants to copy. Hypnotic becomes so many things. While it starts out as a cop thriller, it then becomes a blatant knockoff of Firestarter, with some Scanners thrown in for good measure, and then steals the main twist from The Ninth Configuration/Shutter Island (which I’m also grouping together because they are basically the same concept). I mentioned a bunch of movies in this paragraph that should never be mentioned together. If you’re going to rip off something, please just rip off one thing. It’s fucking jarring when something somehow copies Firestarter and Shutter Island at the same time.
The villain’s powers are about as fluid as the plot, so it’s difficult to ever quite grasp what the rules are supposed to be. In the early stages when the film makes sense, it’s clear that the villain can force people to do his bidding through the power of suggestion. Okay, straightforward enough. However, as the film goes on, these abilities expand so that the villain can just do whatever the script needs in any given moment. Suddenly, he can control masses of people, then he can force people to see him as someone else, then he can alter people’s entire perception of reality and they see the world like its shifting in Inception. There are no rules here, shit just happens and, after a while, I just stopped caring as a wave of “whatever” washed over me.
The principal actors are all sleepwalking through this, particularly Affleck. He wanders through this film with a distinct look of indifference on his face and approaches highly emotional moments with the passion of a man that just saved 5% on his car insurance. William Fichtner, who can normally inject some life into anything, is completely lifeless here and gives a performance that screams of a contractual obligation. These are great, charismatic actors that are performing under a cloud of apathy. It made me want to take a nap. Nobody seems to have been interested in making this movie, let alone distributing it, so I don’t really know why it exists. Robert Rodriguez was once one of my favorite directors (having made From Dusk till Dawn, Desperado and Sin City), but the manic energy that once marked his films is gone. Aside from an odd call-back to Desperado, I never would have guessed that he directed this unfocused and lifeless mess. Hypnotic will quickly slide into the oblivion of obscurity where it belongs.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnotic_(2023_film)#/media/File:Hypnotic_poster.jpg
