From the start of Hypnotic, something just feels off. Why in the sam hill are Robert Rodriguez and Ben Affleck in a movie that seems like a typical police procedural? And then it’s revealed that the story is really about those who have powers to put people under hypnosis to make them do things such as a woman taking off her clothes to create a diversion for a bank robbery.
But I still wasn’t believing Affleck would agree to sign on for a generic thriller like this in which William Fichtner plays Dellrayne, who can make cops turn guns on each other and shoot themselves. No way Rodriguez co-wrote and directed this movie. Needless to say if you know there’s a movie in which Affleck plays a police officer, Det. Danny Rourke, with the Austin Police Department, eventually it will be revealed he has the abilities as well.
Even after more than 30 years in the business, Rodriguez, who famously subjected himself to medical testing to raise funds for his first movie El Mariachi, has always been a director who chose style over the substance. He reportedly wrote the script to Mariachi based what he had available and his circle of friends and friends of friends who were willing to work for nothing. He used camera tricks to cut expenses. It was an impressive beginning. But by the time he finished the Mariachi trilogy with Once Upon a Time in Mexico, the script was much shorter for the 100-minute movie mainly because there’s more action than character dialogue.
That’s a problem with a movie like Hypnotic that requires the right combination of a lot of substance and a lot of style. Three years prior, Rourke’s daughter, Minnie, was supposedly kidnapped by a young man who hasn’t disclosed what happened to her. The abduction, which occured while Rourke took his eyes off his daughter briefly in a crowded park, led to the dissolution of his marriage.
But when the movie opens, Rourke is meeting with his therapist when his partner, Nicks (J.D. Pardo), sends a text saying they’ve been tipped a bank is going to be robbed. As they set up surveillance, Rourke says he knows Dellrayne when he spots him through the crowd. He’s able to get a hold of what Dellrayne was searching for, a safety deposit box with only a Polaroid photo of Minnie (Hala Finley) now 10, with the words FIND LEV DELLRAYNE written at the bottom.
Dellrayne manages to get away by putting others under hypnosis and Rourke and Nicks seek out a fortune teller, Diana Cruz (Alice Braga), but Dellrayne is waiting and puts Nicks under hypnosis to kill them. But Nicks is killed instead and they must flee to Mexico when they are suspected of his murder. Yet there’s still something generic about the plot, even when Rourke and Cruz, both wearing sunglasses and ballcaps are spotted by a Texas Ranger. This is leading up to a twist you can probably see coming.
Suddenly, people aren’t who they seem. Dellrayne can make it appear that others think he’s Jeremiah (Jacke Earle Haley) who used to be an operative with the mysterious Division of Hypnotics. Everything from the extreme heat that has the area in a hazy, sweaty backdrop to the tapping of the therapist’s pen on her clipboard has something to do with the twist. The movie is like Rodriguez and writer Max Borenstein, who wrote the recent Godzilla and King Kong movies, decided to mix together elements of Firestarter, Shutter Island, Vanilla Sky, Totall Recall, Minority Report, and Dark City.
I don’t doubt Rodriguez has seen a lot of movies and has seen a lot of the classic tropes and plot points that have become the traditions of Syd Field’s screenwriting tips. But he doesn’t use it to the best of his ability the way M. Night Shyamalan did with The Sixth Sense. The reason we never expected Bruce Willis’ character to be a ghost because we had seen the traditional prologue of the main character getting shot and wounded several times before. And Skyamalan also only showed us what he wanted us to see.
I had to chuckle a little at the sunglasses and ballcaps as it seems a normal cliche as the characters are also inside a restaurant none the less. The Texas Ranger, I think is also a nod to the late Michael Parks, who played Ranger Earl McGraw in Rodriguez’s From Dusk till Dawn and Planet Terror, which was part of Grindhouse. But at a mere 94 minutes with credits, Hypnotic feels like it should’ve been a good half hour longer and felt less like a cheat when it’s finally revealed what’s happening.
There’s not many clues along the way except for the generic tropes to make us think that what we’re seeing is something totally different. Shutter Island actually made us pay attention to extras in the background as it dropped hints. And Total Recall and Vanilla Sky made us wonder what were we really seeing but setting up scenes that make us question the realities. It’s a good effort by Rodriguez. He claims to have written the first draft in 2002 and called it one of his favorites.
Rumor has it that he had a hard time getting it into production and everything was being set up in the fall of 2019 for cameras to start rolling in 2020. Then, Covid happened in the winter and spring of 2020, putting the production on hold. Then, shooting locations changed leading Rodriguez to keep it in his native Texas. Solstice Studios co-produced the movie but had laid off a good portion of its staff by the time the movie finally went into production in the Fall of 2021. This meant it was left without a domestic distributor which was picked up by Ketchup Entertainment. (Yes, that’s a real media company.) And when the movie opened in May, it received little marketing off a $65 million budget.
I feel that Rodriguez had to cut some of the script out. These scenes might have given the movie more meat to it that would’ve made it feel like we were watching a mind-bender of a movie. Affleck is actually pretty charming as Rourke and Fichtner seems to play up the sleazy roles he’s known for. Sadly, Braga doesn’t seem to get much to do except for the interaction with the Ranger as they make their escape. The ending feels like it was probably supposed to be more elaborate but feels rushed and a cop-out.
It sucks that Rodriguez spent all this time trying to get the movie off the ground and made only for it to fall apart. What’s worse is this isn’t like Dark City where you’ll want to watch it again just for its style and the ideas it presents. I typically like movies that make us question our realities and what’s real and what’s not. I’m sure Rodriguez does too. Yet, you can tell his normal love of a genre isn’t at work. I guess he was so worried about getting the movie made, he made compromises and hoped for the best. He normally edits his own movies himself. It might have helped him to have another set of eyes on this movie.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 