Hypnotic
Warner BrosAfter a string of, more or less, box office poison releases for Robert Rodriguez with Machete Kills, Sin City 2 and the audience adored but critically abolished Alita Battle Angel, the independent and self-produced filmmaker has consciously turned to more IP-centric productions as a gun for a hire, presumably to cinematically recalibrate but more so to hide behind the franchises of which shadow him. Starting with bits and pieces with Disney + – The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett – while also touching base with rival streamer NETFLIX with We Can Be Heroes, the former proclaiming the director back into the mainstream but, more importantly, the latter maintaining that when left to his own devices, large questions remain. Three years later and Rodriguez teams up with star Ben Affleck for the mind-numbingly inducing Inception and paycheck-lite Hypnotic. A feature that, to its credit, for the first third offers an immersive and engaging mystery but is then castrated and left wandering with a twist that places Rodriguez's film in a streamlined and one-note production that has no other option but to finish the last hurrah in basic and lacking mobility. It’s quite hard to thrust any blame upon anyone but who feels the sole perpetrator Rodriguez: who writes, directs and ultimately envisions this train wreck.
What the director does get right at first glance is the enigma of the narrative and the casting of the lead in Ben Affleck. Starting with the former, Rodriguez, to his credit, nails the atmosphere and thus enigmatic pull of his feature in how he devises the opening scenes. It’s all calculated and perhaps overly so with the inevitable twist adding a slight second dimension to the scenes that precede it. Nevertheless, a father looking for his missing daughter and the fallout that has encompassed the devotee character to finding the truth is a strong emotional pull for a viewer that has even one iota of empathy. The emotional immersion works, and then Rodriguez goes further to elevate the material but uses cinematic construct to build a unique world of what is essentially an injection of mind control upon the characters. Again, this is both effective and at times intense due to the nature of the plot that has befallen the characters at hand, but only in the opening act. Aside from using it as a way to slow down both the plot and the characters, who are trying to further proceedings, it is an element that feels ever so underwhelming and flat both visually and narratively. It’s effectively granted but used almost solely as a plot device to stop the narrative from proceeding and thus makes the whole emphasis of what makes this feature unique the one thing that the audience becomes tired of. The bitter irony of that statement ultimately condemns the feature to a no-win outcome.
Even visually, this elevation lacks and goes into the territory of being used as something only ever as eye-candy. The visual quality is nothing but flat. One moment in particular evokes a sentiment seen in Nolan’s Inception with rows of architecture proceeding to bend over itself in a blink-and-missed cameo of cinematic intrigue but, again, it is simply a notion of visual reference and nothing here stands on its own with power or prowess. Then Hypnotic pulls out the big one with an on-the-surface clever and intriguing twist, but like the narrative technique of the title used, it can not or will not further this revelation and simply sits on the idea without any progression. The film ultimately erodes from this point forward, cannot rescue itself and, as aforementioned in the opening paragraph, has no choice but to walk the green mile to whatever bitter end it has because it has no direction to take. The issue is that if Rodriguez had any ounce of idea and elevation, why not evoke a sense of heartfelt poignant tragedy in the same vein as Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, a sentiment of self-imposed doomed ideology to take secrets to the grave to protect those from discovering the truth? It seems to be the most beneficial and devastating output but by far, yet adds such a deep-rooted and tormented emotional layered pull and gut punch.
Alas, this is not the case and Rodriquez is left to atone for his sins with a feature that defecates the bed. Left to rot in this much is Affleck, who for the most part does a welcomed job to make this material feel compelling – at least on the surface. But even when the twist arrives, the whole demeanour and character takes a sharp turn into a smug, shit-eating grin that can’t be escaped, and all feeling of that very emotional pull that engaged with the viewer is not used against them. Again, the irony of the very thing that invited the audience to participate is used then inadvertent to push them away, and for a director to do this not just once but twice is not only ludicrous but ever so condescending of the material and not understanding the projection of it.
Made more strange is that Affleck has already done this whole experience with the underwhelming albeit more interesting John Woo thriller Pay/Check Teo decades before it, therefore the pull of working with Rodriquez or just wanting to keep working might need to be reassessed in the wake of wasting his own time but also the audiences’. Furthermore, William Fitcher turns up as the feature's villain but his or the organisation he runs emphasis what they want or what they even do gets utterly lost in the nonsensical drama that unfolds. To be quite frank, the demeanour Fitcher puts forward of comatose boredom at least acknowledges to the audience early on what type of experience they’re participating in. Made more frustrating and again, perhaps furthers the point of a director totally and wholly out of touch with his material is that Hypnotic dares to throw in another twist in a mid-credits scene to say that things aren’t quite as over as the ending suggests. What a sick and evil antagonistic approach and threat to an audience who have just witnessed this torturous ride only to tell them more might be on the way. It just all blows the mind with how idiotic and self-important this feature has been made and devised, in which it has to come to a point with Rodriquez completely stepping back and going to his roots of filmmaking. The feeling of needing to stop hiding behind the shadow of an IP – which has been crafted and built far earlier than having a caretaker director shooting the material – comes to mind and the oneness of self-financing train wreck like Hypnotic will creatively and financially bankrupt before long.
