I Just Saw

So I just saw Hypnotic, which I will henceforth refer to as “budget Inception”, and it was pretty dull. Director Robert Rodriguez always had a B-movie sensibility, of course, but how did the maker of El Mariachi (1992), Desperado (1995), and, erm, Spy Kids (2001) end up making something as generic and dull-witted as Hypnotic? Could it be a fully committed, auteurist homage to straight-to-VHS/DVD garbage from the ‘90s/‘00s, a la the ‘70s-style Grindhouse project he made with Quentin Tarantino?

When I was a teenager there was a rough convenience store near my mother’s flat that discounted out-of-date food and rented DVDs. That was how I saw such “classic” sci-fi thrillers as Paycheck (2003, also starring Ben Affleck) and The Final Cut (2004), that Robin Williams one where he plays a man who edits people’s memories to make memorials. Hypnotic reminds me of one of those movies.

Ben Affleck plays detective Danny Rourke, who as the movie opens is in therapy to deal with his grief over his daughter’s disappearance. He’s called to a bank heist where a mysterious hypnotist known as Dellrayne (William Fichtner) uses his gift to enact a fiendish plan that seems to involve Rourke’s child, a Polaroid of whom shows up in a safety deposit box. To solve the mystery, Rourke teams up with Diana (Alice Braga), a small-time con and fortune teller being hunted by Dellrayne.

This is one of my least favourite types of psychological thriller, where it’s all different layers of reality that aren’t grounded in anything and is just the screenplay playing silly beggars with you for 90 minutes. I don’t mind a crossword puzzle, but I prefer it to have some kind of style and approach, a feeling that I’m watching something beyond a couple of writers saying, ‘Dude, wouldn’t it be cool if…’ back and forth.

The film looks extremely cheap, taking place in a faceless city with signs like “department of occupational therapy” and “public works” that look like they were mocked up by student filmmakers. Looking up the budget, the 65 million price tag suggests that this is one of those projects where over two-thirds of the cost went on the lead actor’s paycheck, meaning that in effect what it cost to bring together was closer to between 5 and 10 million.

I guess you could say that the under-realised setting is justified by a twist later on, but a film that’s dull to look at is just a film that’s dull to look at. The reality-warping effects are modelled on Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2004), but all they do is make the film look even more like a cheap knockoff of a genuine vision.

Hypnotic’s script is on a TV movie level. Alice Braga is playing Exposition Woman, whose function is to talk at length about what “hypnotics” are (people who can put others in a trance and puppet them) and guide you through the story, while Affleck is there to deliver macho cliches. The biggest question that Hypnotic left me with was why the bad guys were dressed like Butlin’s redcoats. Funniest of all, though, was when it tried to pull off a credit cookie that sets up a sequel. As if anyone’s gonna be begging to see an extension of THIS universe.