Not Quite Mesmerizing: Robert Rodriguez's "Hypnotic"

"Affleck! You da bomb in Phantoms, yo!" Jason Mewes (well, Kevin Smith, if we’re being honest), Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back...dunno how Jay'd feel about his boy in Hypnotic.

Full disclosure: I really like Robert Rodriguez’s work. He is, at best, a really good storyteller; his family fare is engaging and his more outre, gonzo stuff is as the kids say, “awesome”…until it’s not. The critical faculties kick in and either Rodriguez is trafficking in ambiguity or scenes that are intended to be earnest and/or sincere, elicit snickers and sometimes barely stifled belly laughs. From me, anyway (and I like his work!)

Hypnotic is his latest release and out of deference to the filmmaker’s request, I won’t go into spoiler territory. As Robert said in his introduction, it is “twisty” but more in the sense of curlicues as opposed to spirals of ingenuity and plot turns. It is, and I mean this in the best possible way, a pulpmeister’s version of Inception. In fact, chances are good that if you’ve seen any film full of circular plotting, mistaken identities, overlays on mundane reality, or if you just watched David Tennant as Kilgrave in the Marvel series Jessica Jones, you will be far ahead of the game and possibly the auteur himself.

I won’t get all spoilery because, frankly, it would mean excessive verbiage full of “and then this happened” and “then…” clauses and connectors. Suffice it to say, Ben Affleck plays Detective Danny Rourke whose child was kidnapped right under his nose! His life has fallen apart, he’s in therapy, and returns to active duty to crack a series of mysterious bank robberies. On stakeout, Rourke recognizes a strange man who has done or said something to a woman on a bench, then approaches the two guards protecting an armored truck and by this time, Rourke is already in action, finds the safety deposit box before the villain gets to it, in which is a Polaroid of his daughter. Action ensues, things and people are not what they seem, and withal, it’s a fun ride as long as you don’t take it seriously.

Rodriguez’s films rest on a genuine love of genre and principally B-movie vocabulary. I’m never quite sure how much of that is intentional or if it’s just that that filmic language is merely second nature to him as a director and writer. To say he has serious chops is beside the point. Anyone who’s watched Desperado, Sin City, Machete, or Spy Kids knows he is borderline genius with filming action sequences and moving a story along through terrific editing. That Rodriguez is a one-man studio is a point for admiration; that he is able to pull off entertaining and well-made films so far under typical Hollywood budgets is nearly miraculous. There is a reason James Cameron tapped Rodriguez to direct Alita: Battle Angel, the project that pretty much shows how much he’s grown in confidence as a director of other people’s work. It stands as evidence that if he chose to, Rodriguez would be a fine director for hire. 

However - and there’s always one of those, like his pal Kevin Smith, he can lose characters to mouthing mountains of exposition, and situate them in moments that are supposed to be charged with emotion but come off contrived, if not downright hammy. In Hypnotic, Affleck and Alice Braga are saddled with going from portraying emotionally fraught characters on the run, to mouthpieces for setting up plot points that really are not necessary. Oddly, this doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of this ramshackle bit of fun, but my eyeballs can only roll so far back in my head.

Affleck is fine, but I couldn’t decide if he was enjoying this return to a role tailor-made for his younger self (see Phantoms, Reindeer Games, etc., etc.) or if he thought this was a serious acting challenge. Rourke is a pretty familiar Rodriguez hero who wouldn’t be out of place with Danny Trejo’s Machete or Bruce Willis’s Hartigan. The problem that people don’t act or talk like this is solved, a priori, when we accept the ludicrous circumstances of the whole piece. If an actor takes it too seriously, the results are going to be campy at best. With Hypnotic, this is most assuredly the case.

Affleck is one of our finer directors (see “Air”, now out in cinemas) but as a lead actor, mileage has varied extensively. Here we get a sub-Bruce Wayne version Ben who by the end of the film, may have realized what kind of a movie he’s been in all along. By contrast, Alice Braga turns in a similarly heartfelt performance, but she’s swimming against the tide as much as Affleck. Even William Fichtner as Rourke’s nemesis seems to be having a hard time being malevolent and comes off as merely wooden. If it sounds like the performances are a deterrent, though, they’re not. As a Rodriguez fan, you learn to eat the bitter and deal with it. 

Hypnotic, despite my reservations about the acting (and by extension, the writing) is still a fun romp. It is The Matrix, Inception, Vertigo, and a world of cinematic masterpieces fed through Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios B-movie blender. The ethics and esthetics of the approach serve him well and honestly, if the effects are bargain basement versions of bigger FX driven films, that’s actually part of the charm (and they actually work well for the story at hand.) Turn off the brain, double up on the popcorn and have a (shotgun) blast.