Robert Uses Hypnosis
Reading the pitch for Hypnotic, one might think Robert Rodriguez and his co-screenwriter Max Borenstein (Godzilla, Kong: Skull Island) wanted to pay homage to Jedi mind-trick techniques. Chronologically, it tracks, since the director of The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl would have begun drafting the screenplay in 2002, at the height of George Lucas’s The Love Is in the Meadow era (yes, Attack of the Clones).
Judge for yourself: traumatized by the death of his daughter, a detective uncovers, during an investigation, a clash between super-hypnotists (the… “hypnotics”, yes indeed) capable of persuading anyone to do whatever they want with a single sentence.
If you think this is opening the floodgates to anything and everything, you have no idea how far it goes. After about 25 minutes of runtime, and in the wake of a lunar, off-kilter explanatory dialogue led by an Alice Braga who is as perplexed as her character, the film completely careens off the rails, sometimes literally. The twists accumulate at a metronomic pace, defying common sense or even the rules laid down by the script a mere three scenes earlier. Gradually the powers of the “hypnotics” approach those of Doctor Strange, Ben Affleck’s jawline reaches three tons per square centimeter, and this ridiculous TV-thriller mutates into a full-on ridiculous frenzy.
The antagonists can shape the heroes’ perception at will (whether they’re receptive or not, apparently…), to the point of stacking inconsistencies. So every encounter, every dialogue, every sequence ends with a pseudo-shattering reveal that turns everything upside down… but nothing lies ahead. Because in a world where every character can transform reality at will, or at the whim of the screenplay, nothing makes sense and any form of suspense or even surprise is annihilated. Until a post-credits scene that feels more like a childish final gesture than a gripping cliffhanger.
A colossal mess that almost makes it a second iteration of the too-quickly-forgotten Trance by Danny Boyle, who was precisely careful to dissolve the mental health and morality of his characters in a tangle of narrative knots. Yet the big twist arriving after an hour sets up a rather unoriginal parallel with the artifice of popular cinema, itself a lure that relies on sets and green screens to fool its victim.
Inception
Yet the influences of the illustrious Spy Kids: Armageddon director (patience, it’s coming) are not to be sought in George Lucas, but in… Alfred Hitchcock. It’s not exactly the critics who say so, but the man himself, who described his own work, a product of long maturation apparently, to Collider as “Hitchcock on steroids”, if you will. And it’s precisely because he takes himself so seriously that he avoids adding a dud to his rather erratic filmography.
Hypnotic is an inadvertent pastiche, not of Hitchcockian style or even of film noir (though it tries to imitate the aesthetic with brownish grading and green neon) but of the 2000s techno-thriller that pretends to be something and riffs on references somewhat at random.
One-note, functionary characters who get lost in implausible plot mechanics with the aim of wowing the audience rather than entertaining them, botched car chases, a synthetic score that drones on every revelation, all in a running time as tight as Ben Affleck’s medial pterygoid muscle (1h32 including the credits): it’s a bingo.
Obviously, no one hesitated to compare it with the biggest successes of one of the few directors who truly masters the craft: Christopher Nolan. It’s hard not to notice the meta approach, the staging, the sunlit family visions, the narrative escalation, the play on perception, and especially the tilted-ground visions (here in a version that’s like a tequila-soaked dream) from Inception. Under the guise of paying homage to the master of suspense, Rodriguez brazenly trespasses onto Nolan’s turf.
As a parody of his imitators, Hypnotic is effective despite itself, and that’s what makes it oddly watchable, especially with a few friends along for the ride. Nolan himself has moved on, so its release feels deliciously anachronistic, and its monumental flop (less than $10 million worldwide at the time of writing, for a wildly improbable budget of $60–80 million) is even funnier. In the United States, Warner hasn’t yet monopolized the field of misfires.
