Drawing inspiration from The Matrix, Edge of Tomorrow, and, especially, Christopher Nolan’s Memento and Inception, Robert Rodriguez’s sci-fi neo-noir Hypnotic is less homage than a faded copy of a copy. Rodriguez and co-writer Max Borenstein certainly aren’t the first filmmakers to recycle a high-concept idea. But for a film so explicitly concerned with the reshaping of reality, Hypnotic’s utter failure to present a world that feels remotely convincing or fleshed out is a source of constant distraction. And while a couple of its myriad twists are clever enough, the film is often more mind-numbing than mind-bending.
Hypnotic opens with urban police officer Danny Rourke (Ben Affleck) mourning the kidnapping of his seven-year-old daughter, Minnie (Ionie Nieves), whose abductor, once caught, claims no memory of his actions or her whereabouts. Something is off about the whole incident, the details of which are replayed for the audience via a slow-motion flashback that suggests a cheesy re-enactment from a true-crime reality show. Later, when Danny attempts to prevent a bank robbery thanks to an anonymous tip and comes into the orbit of an ominous criminal, Dellrayne (William Fichtner), who seemingly persuades innocent bystanders to do his bidding by merely uttering a few words to them, it becomes clear that something fantastical is afoot.
This heist sequence is a genuinely thrilling moment in a sea of endless exposition, especially as Dellrayne causes widespread chaos and grizzly suicides from some of the men and women whose minds he hacked into. Of course, the criminal mastermind escapes Rourke’s grasp, but for a few brief minutes, Hypnotic is enlivened by the ingeniously eerie staging of the heist. That makes it all the more frustrating that it’s the last time that the veil of mystery that suffuses the film’s proceedings isn’t lifted in torturous fashion by one of the characters.
Following the heist, Rourke meets up with the caller of the anonymous tip, a two-bit psychic named Diana (Alice Braga), who warns him of how dangerous Dellrayne is and how she shares the criminal mastermind’s hypnotic powers, which basically amount to little more than nefarious Jedi-like mind tricks. At this point, we’re also treated to lectures about a secret government program unimaginatively dubbed “Division” and “hypnotic constructs,” which force hypnotized subjects to experience a reality that’s entirely constructed by the hypnotic’s mind.
It’s at this point that Hypnotic devolves into a tiresome parade of twists and rug-pulls. Some of these surprises may have felt fresh in 2002, when Rodriguez initially conceived of the film. And while budgetary constraints surely play a large factor in this case, the larger set pieces suffer from janky editing and bargain-basement visual effects that brazenly try to mimic Inception’s elaborate, contorted worlds with nothing but the most basic warp effects.
For all of Hypnotic’s hackneyed story beats and exposition dumps, its greatest sin is its overreliance on the ability of multiple characters to morph reality at the drop of a hat. As various characters wield their hypnotic powers throughout the film, locations and people’s identities are constantly revealed to be illusions, and to the point that it becomes impossible to not see this as a sort of sleight of hand to disguise the narrative’s shortcomings.
“What you see isn’t real,” says Dellrayne to Rourke at one point, but it could just as well be the filmmakers talking to us. If nothing’s real, and there are no rules to Hypnotic’s reality-bending, why should we care about what’s happening on screen, including outmoded bag of cinematic tricks? In a particularly silly twist that only accidentally alludes to the illusory nature of filmmaking itself, Hypnotic reveals itself to be much like a house of cards—a pointlessly complicated construct that inevitably collapses in large part due to its own hollowness.
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