Directed By Robert Rodriguez

Starring – Ben Affleck, Alice Braga, JD Pardo

The Plot – When a detective (Affleck) learns that his missing daughter and a string of high profile bank robberies might be connected, he must go on a mind-bending journey to find his daughter and stop the secret government agency behind the madness.

Rated R for violence

HYPNOTIC Official Trailer | In Theaters May 12 – YouTube

POSITIVES

For his first theatrical narrative since “Alita: Battle Angel”, Rodriguez returns to the director’s chair with a freshly innovative idea that finds him outside of his already bizarre comfort zone in the history of his projects. Rodriguez expands remarkly on the idea of this intimate group of people with the ability to telepathically influence the lives of others, and with some clever uses of its tricks leading to a rich combination of synthetic humor and impressive special effects, at least allows him to capably set the table for a compelling narrative that begins with the heartbreaking reality of this father losing his daughter, without a clue or suspect to turn towards. The empathy for him is enriched superbly from Affleck, who here conjures the crippling agony and overwhelming regret of being in the wrong place at the wrong time during that one fateful day. Affleck is definitely giving his all to Rodriguez, and with some intensity for physicality that affords the actor to get his hands dirty for the first time since he donned The Dark Knight, we’re reminded that he still has plenty to bring towards the integrity of any film he accompanies. Besides Affleck, there are also solid turns from Braga, with her dependable layer of never-ending charisma, and one of my favorite film veterans, William Fichtner, who as a menacing and unforgiving antagonist feels like a Cyberdyne robot who escaped the Terminator franchise. Lastly, major kudos to the complexity in presentations from Rodriguez, who once more brandishes his own cinematography to the experience. When the movie begins, there’s this uncanny valley feel towards much of the consistency of visuals, and as the narrative expands upon itself with many re-evaluating twists, you start to understand that the artificiality of these backdrops and color filters breed something integral to the corresponding storytelling, in turn increasing their beauty and glowing naturalism the longer the film persists, eluding it from feeling like a cheap and distracting presentation to Rodriguez often visually spectacular features.

NEGATIVES

Truthfully and tragically, this film expands perhaps a bit too much on the aforementioned innovative ideas of its plot outline, with an abundance of second half twists and unnatural exposition that grow tediously contrived the more the screenplay tried to outwit its audience with ground-shaking revelations about its characters. The thing with twists is that they should be carefully orchestrated, with no more than a couple throughout, but also line up believably with everything taking shape. But here, the film’s last forty minutes drops one every other scene, which not only convolutes the cohesiveness of the film that will undoubtedly tax audiences into exhaustion, but also plays its hand a bit too early with a couple of directions that could and should be easily sniffed out with the visual likeness of Affleck’s kidnapped on-screen daughter. As for the exposition itself, the film feels like it’s constantly alluding to the past while unraveling in the current day narrative, with detail-heavy dialogue that spoon-feeds an audience, but also these strange flashbacks in the captivity of Affleck’s character, which surmize at the most convenient moments, usually after a momentary mystery has appeared out of thin air. Speaking of convenience, they’re littered frantically throughout this heavily flawed script, with leaps in logic so gargantuan that the following scene has no choice but to address them, and when they do, they’re often still not enough to silence the doubt from within me that whispers this conflict could be resolved in ten minutes with the kind of supernatural powers that certain characters possess. This is all of course problematic to the film’s structure in pacing, which with a brief 88 minute run time, forces the material into overdrive by undercutting the materializing of events into feeling like these condensed sentences, in turn rushing the motivations and impact of the events in ways that directly undercut the stakes and humanity of everyone involved. The good news is that it’s impossible to be bored by a movie that is void of the down time moments of character building, but the bad is that it comes at the cost of redundancy with the film’s inferior second half dedicating itself to the variety of aforementioned twists that smother you with so many of them that you stop caring long before the climax. Finally, while most of the film’s technical components are good, or at the very least serviceable, the editing, also by Rodriguez, is occasionally so eccentric that it obscures coherence in the confines of physical conflicts. One such instance takes place inside of a jail cell, with Affleck and Braga battling off a hypnotized adversary, and a wrestling match between Affleck and this person clumsily constructed with pasting so poorly pieced together that I didn’t know who was cuffed to the bars, or who took the gun. There are certainly other examples that emit a couple of continuity errors from one cut to the next, but the point is that I’ve always felt that Rodriguez wears himself too thin by being involved with so many measures of production, with it here finally feeling like it caught up to him in ways that are legitimately compromising his efforts.

OVERALL
“Hypnotic” often feels asleep at the wheel, despite the benefit of a soulful spin from Affleck while inside of a synopsis that feels refreshingly original for Rodriguez. The problem is simply too much of a good thing overwhelming the returns, with a smothering of convoluted and contrived twists, spoon-fed exposition in dialogue, and rushed storytelling overwhelming interpretation, deducing this once prosperous idea inside of a kidnapping thriller to narcolepsy.

My Grade: 3/10 or D-