Don Shanahan
Robert Rodriguez’s Hypnotic situates itself as a shining example of over-explanation messing up promising ideas. It should come as no surprise to those who have enjoyed the filmmaker’s distinctive works over the years that Rodriguez has a hell of a starting concept and escalating rub. The trouble is he and MonsterVerse screenwriter Max Borenstein think more is more.
Set in the city of Austin, Texas, Ben Affleck toplines as Danny Rourke, a grizzled and shell-shocked police detective finishing up his required occupational therapy to get back on duty. He’s saying the right things in the exit session, but he is clearly still tormented by the unsolved kidnapping of his daughter Minnie (Hala Finley of We Can Be Heroes) and his failed marriage. Come hell or high water, Rourke is the kind of cop that is clearly going to try too hard to save everyone’s day he can, ignore all his liabilities, and continue his all-consuming quest to find his missing daughter.
Affleck takes this hangdog characterization setting in Hypnotic and squeezes it for every drop. The A-lister’s charisma is exchanged for full-on and, frankly, off-putting mopeyness. Now, that kind of performance could play in a slow-burn quest. Affleck’s acting choices as a defeated, moral man continuing to fall from grace through the seedy criminal underbelly that holds the answers to reuniting his family would fit. But, Hypnotic is not that simple of a movie.
Immediately after getting back on the force, Rourke and his partners receive an anonymous tip for a safe deposit box bank robbery. Enter the mysterious figure of Lev Dellrayne played by veteran character actor William Fichtner. With mere glances and voiced phrases, Lev seemingly appears to be able to take over another’s thoughts with violent results and no way to reverse the control. Favorably and mysteriously, Rourke appears to be impervious to Lev’s instant manipulation and skates through a disastrous scene at the bank with a jarring clue in the form of a Polaroid picture that connects Lev Dellrayne to Minnie’s disappearance.
Whoa! Hold up. We’ve got a high-level mentalist weaponizing his powers of suggestion and controlling speech to become a nefarious criminal and that’s the dude that took our hero’s kid?! Now that’s the kind of escalating rub wholly appropriate of the daring Robert Rodriguez! Skipping over an obvious chuckle from the normal stage-performing and parlor trick-using hypnotist stereotype we are all likely picturing, Hypnotic’s unfurled questions of how, why, who’s under control, who’s not, and what happens next percolate like crazy. There’s a worthy mano y mano neo-noir thriller in that imaginative premise, pitting an edgy Affleck against an underappreciated professional movie villain of menace like Fichtner.
That has to be enough for Hypnotic to go on, right? Sadly not. The pursuit of Lev Dellrayne cracks open a larger world of shrouded conspiracy. It turns out there is a clandestine government agency, dubbed the “Division,” training entire teams of the titular operatives, including Alice Braga’s Diana Cruz coming to Danny’s aid, to be infiltration assets. Moreover, we learn several of our characters have had their minds wiped and planted with triggers that set them on the pursuing paths we are witnessing for a grand MacGuffin called “Domino.”
This is where Rodriguez and Borenstein pile on revelations and stakes into Hypnotic until it overflows with implausibility and utter convolution. The more layers it adds to explain itself or rush its world-building, the worse it becomes. Each twist feels more like a smudging eraser to what transpires before the swerve than an enhancing accentuation to what was being built. Less would have been more.
Through this widening ordeal, Ben Affleck stays super serious and never leaves that aforementioned forlorn gear, and it drags down Hypnotic. Matched with a resigned Affleck, Alice Braga becomes the verbal emoter the movie needs, yet she is saddled with the duty of dumping the majority of the exposition. All the while, Fichtner, who is a gifted monologuer if you let him, stalks silently and miraculously from place to place as if he knows everyone’s next move (because he secretly does) better than a slasher villain chasing teenagers. Give him something to really chew.
Meanwhile, the rest of the movie is trying to slam on the accelerator past Affleck. The do-it-all auteur Rodriguez is no stranger to frenetic editing and camerawork, teaming with music video cinematographer Pablo Berron for a slick picture. Coupled with a booming score done by Robert’s son Rebel Rodriguez, Hypnotic can really move in between rug pulls if it wants to push. Against the norm, the movie is probably better when it doesn’t stop to explain itself– and then over-explain itself– and lets the enigma stay an enigma.
Starting with a retreaded joke from Rodriguez’s own Desperado and continuing with the Polaroid picture breadcrumb that evokes Nolan’s Memento and wild deaths that could have come straight out of Shyamalan’s The Happening, Hypnotic accumulates one “stop me if you have heard this one” moment after another. Without revealing too much, let’s just say a savvy genre film fan could build quite a checklist of beats and ideas they’ve seen attempted and executed better in other places.
The real question for Hypnotic is whether these inclusions and angles are nods and homages or cheap knockoffs. For a while, the invisible layers are bonkers, but they flirt with turning clever after a while. Nevertheless, it still feels like the trivial latter. The aftereffect of all this creates one of the most cockamamie and off-the-rails action movies in recent memory.
