Review: Hypnotic

Image courtesy of Ketchup Entertainment.

Robert Rodriguez's "Hypnotic" is the type of lower budget action thriller that was once prominent and has all but disappeared as movie studios focus on getting their latest blockbuster on eight of the 10 screens at your local multiplex. Although the film has its flaws and its inspiration very obviously comes from one specific source, "Hypnotic" is intermittently entertaining, even if its nonstop twists eventually become a bit too much.

Rodriguez has long made pulpy action films and thrillers - his best work includes "El Mariachi," "Desperado," "Sin City" and "Planet Terror," his contribution to the underrated "Grindhouse" double feature - but his latest is more of the mind-bender variety. At one point in the film, the lead character played by Ben Affleck believes that he's witnessing the road he's on curve upward and head up into the sky, and the rest of the world appears to be upside down above him. My first thought was that Rodriguez had been binge watching Christopher Nolan movies lately.

That director is an obvious source of inspiration for this thriller, which finds Affleck's Austin-based Detective Daniel Rourke searching for his young daughter, who was kidnapped in front of his eyes in a park. As the film opens, Rourke is undergoing some sort of hypnotic therapy when he's called to the scene of a bank robbery. He spots a mysterious man (William Fichtner), who is apparently using some sort of hypnosis to convince security guards and a bank teller to carry out the robbery. Even more strange, Rourke's missing daughter's name appears on a piece of paper in a bank vault.

When Rourke follows the mystery man to a rooftop, the stranger convinces two cops who are accompanying Rourke to shoot each other before he disappears by slipping over the side of the roof. Rourke, baffled, learns that a woman called in the tip to the police. He is led to the business of a psychic named Diana (Alice Braga), who spins a fantastical web about a government agency - of which she was once a part - that employs hypnotics, and how one particularly powerful hypnotic (Fichtner) had escaped its grasp and was in search of a top secret weapon known as Domino.

The plot veers off in many directions and engages in numerous sleights of hand, many of which involve a character breaking out of a hypnotic state, only to find that their reality is different than what they supposed it to be at any given moment. This is both a compelling manner in keeping this thriller propelling forward, but it's also - on occasion - an easy way out when the story starts becoming too labyrinthine. In other words, it occasionally works, but others times doesn't.

"Hypnotic" is much more polished than your typical Rodriguez picture, who typically tends to lend a grindhouse vibe to his movies - think "Machete" or "Planet Terror" - or make movies for his children (the "Spy Kids" movies, for example). As a Nolan-inspired knockoff, "Hypnotic" isn't half bad. It's not a great thriller, but it moves quickly and has some surprising twists. It even recycles an old joke from "Desperado." 

But I appreciate that a modest, mid-range budgeted thriller can make its way to theaters, when so many others of its type are heading directly to streaming to allow for the summer's blockbusters to take up every single screen. It's nice to know that such movies still - at least, for the time being - exist.