Hypnotic
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy watching Rodriguez clumsily apply his signature fetishes to “Hypnotic,” a movie where Alice Braga offers Ben Affleck a glass of clear moonshine whiskey and an unnamed Texas Ranger, with a white cowboy hat and matching suit, takes his coffee “black ‘n sludgy.” If you’re a Rodriguez fan, you might be charmed by these clumsy and perhaps over-confident personal touches. His humor is certainly corny enough to be an acquired taste, like when River, Okeniyi’s paranoid hacker, offers Rourke some “homemade Mountain Dew” after showing him his disturbed mind corkboard, which connects everything to hypnotics, from Brexit to the Pope. “My own brew, all organic,” River boasts about his DIY Dew. Rourke still declines.
Fans will recognize and appreciate the well-worn pleasures of this lightly seasoned genre exercise. Others will understandably laugh at Ben Affleck when he says things like, “Hypnotics did all this?!” Rodriguez also tends to linger on shots and story beats a little too long, presumably to ensure distracted viewers cannot miss overt cues. It’s hard, though not impossible, to be seduced given these trying conditions.
There is a persistent narrative conundrum the film falls into when it comes to the derivative nature of much of its beginning. On the one hand, the manner in which it goes through the motions of in-between scenes from a diner confrontation to a chase on train tracks feels played out. On the other, this is all by design as the narrative itself is meant to be questioned the longer it goes on. Some of this is because of its more standard conspiratorial underpinnings, but there is also a moment where it all gets turned on its head. Whether you are willing to make this leap with it will depend on whether you were getting wrapped up in the action that preceded it. Said buildup is Rodriguez showing he still can direct action well with plenty of tense sequences that are injected with an unpredictability stemming from the film’s hypnotic hook. While some of the trickery is obvious, it still shines when all the layers to the deception are revealed. There is one motorcycle chase sequence where the entire landscape gets flipped on itself, like that aforementioned film which will not be named here, which proves to be a standout visually even if it is an empty spectacle in retrospect. This is largely forgivable as it becomes more of a gag when the film lays all its cards on the overturned table
Look, the dramatic stakes could be higher, but that’s part of the fun with “Hypnotic,” a bombastic, pseudo-mindbending chase movie where A-listers mosey into an underwhelming twist. Your enjoyment depends on how badly you want to watch Rodriguez and the gang struggle to pull a well-beaten rug out from under you. “Hypnotic” may not be clever or energetic enough to keep your mind from wandering, but it is charming in its own stumbling way.
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