Ben Affleck has been on a rather impressive winning streak as of late, beginning with his sterling work in Gavin O’Connor’s underseen 2020 gem The Way Back and continuing with his excellent supporting turns in Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel and George Clooney’s The Tender Bar (both from 2021)—as well as in last month’s Air, which he also directed.
Factor in the relatively redemptive recut of Zack Snyder’s Justice League and the pulpy Deep Water, and the 50-year-old actor seems to have found a solid groove, proving equally comfortable in dramas, thrillers, historical epics, and superhero sagas that know how to take prime advantage of his stout, charismatic force of personality.
All of which makes Hypnotic so brutally disappointing.
Premiering in theaters on May 12 following its recent debut at the SXSW Film and TV Festival, Affleck’s latest is a B-movie with a C+ premise and D-minus execution, the last of which largely falls at the feet of director Robert Rodriguez. Working from a script co-written with Max Borenstein (Godzilla vs. Kong), the Desperado and Spy Kids auteur’s film is a mess from top to bottom, as dimly conceived as it is clunkily constructed.
A patchwork quilt of elements borrowed from The Matrix, Vertigo, Inception, and Memento (not to mention Stranger Things and the numerous Stephen King novels that preceded it), it’s a fiasco which reminds one that even Hollywood’s most talented aren’t immune from falling flat on their faces.
Hypnotic opens with a woman calling out to Danny Rourke (Affleck), set to the close-up sight of his eye—one of myriad spherical images that populate these proceedings, and serve as Rodriguez’s means of tipping his hand from the start that the forthcoming tale will be circular in nature. Meanwhile, maze-like designs on elevator and garage walls (among other surfaces) imply a labyrinthine mystery to come.
At outset, that has little to do with Rourke, a city cop still struggling to get over the fact that his beloved daughter Minnie (Ionie Nieves) was kidnapped at a playground by a creepy young man who now claims to have no memory of committing the abduction or the girl’s whereabouts. Though cleared by his therapist to return to active duty, Rourke remains traumatized, and that’s before he rejoins his partner Nicks (JD Pardo) and is promptly informed that an anonymous tipster is predicting yet another in an ongoing series of bank robberies.
At the scene of the supposed crime, chaos erupts when Rourke and Nicks witness a strange man (William Fichtner) compel strangers to do his bidding via a series of ostensibly mundane code words, all so he might acquire the contents of a safety deposit box. Rourke reaches that container first and, inside, finds a photo of his missing daughter that features the words “Van Dellrayne”—the same name as Fichtner’s baddie.
For unknown reasons, Rourke proves resistant to Dellrayne’s paranormal persuasions and escapes this calamitous encounter unscathed. Shortly thereafter, he’s pointed in the direction of Diana Cruz (Alice Braga), a local psychic who, following a near-fatal encounter with Dellrayne, explains to Rourke the unbelievable situation at hand: Dellrayne is a “hypnotic” with the power to warp the perspectives (and, thus, behavior) of anyone he encounters, creating “constructs” that make his victims think they’re behaving normally while doing his bidding.
Despite the wannabe-novel way in which Diana describes it, Dellrayne is just a Professor X-grade mutant who can control people’s minds, and since he’s the strongest of his kind, Rourke and Diana have little recourse but to repeatedly flee him and those he sends after them. This is only the first of many revelations that Hypnotic has in store, although given the “nothing is as it seems” game being played here, it’s not difficult to foresee the litany of ensuing surprises.
Before long, Rourke is learning all sorts of things about himself, Diana, Dellrayne, and his beloved little girl, most of it courtesy of Diana’s vomitous exposition dumps, which slow the action to a crawl in order to clue audiences into the nonsense propelling the narrative forward.
Rodriguez and Borenstein’s script is a series of long-winded explanations about its supernatural specifics (and mythology) interspersed with ho-hum shootouts and chase sequences, and its chintzy silliness more than mildly recalls Nicolas Cage’s 2007 sci-fi dud Next. Rodriguez’s noir-ish shadows and self-consciously showy camerawork are as clichéd as every aspect of his story. Eventually, that turns out to be part of the point, since Hypnotic is, at heart, a tale about using recognizable fictional conventions to unlock genuine truths.
Unfortunately, however, the film isn’t canny enough to do anything with that potentially intriguing meta angle; it believes that its every twist is mind-blowing enough to keep the action engaging on its own baseline genre terms—an assumption that turns out to be seriously misguided.
As befitting Rourke’s screwy-headed condition, Affleck grimaces, scowls, and looks dazed and confused throughout most of Hypnotic. Only in its later passages does he get to express anything resembling a convincing emotion or trace of individuality, but by that point, it’s too little, too late. In the race to its conclusion, the film piles bombshell upon bombshell in a vain attempt to astonish viewers. In doing so, it finally shows a few faint flickers of life—and allows its lead to do likewise. The problem is that the eye-openers it peddles are photocopies of photocopies of shockers pilfered from far better movies.
Even the appearance of the reliably entertaining Jeff Fahey (a Rodriguez favorite ever since the director cast him in 2007’s Planet Terror) winds up being a letdown, since the actor is squandered during a finale that’s chiefly fixated on shots of Affleck, Fichtner, and others staring intensely at each other—because, you know, they’re using their mind powers. Any bargain basement psychic can see where this is going by the midway point. Worse, however, is the choppy pace at which it heads there—epitomized by a first act that moves so fast, it feels as if significant plot chunks were hastily excised in order to keep the runtime tight.
Hypnotic is ultimately a lot like Rourke describes Minnie at the playground, spinning round and round until it’s so dizzy that it collapses. It’s the kind of dud that appears destined for a quick theatrical demise—and, then, to be forgotten by everyone who sees it.
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