Hypnotic (2023) Dir. Robert Rodriguez

Affleck plays a divorced detective mourning his missing 7-year old daughter who stakeouts a bank and witnesses a heist undertaken by a group of individuals under the hypnosis of a mysterious man (William Fichtner). Phew!

Affleck subsequently crosses paths with Alice Braga’s fortune-teller who explains that Fichtner is a “Hypnotic”, mind-benders trained by the government to “influence the brain over a psychic bandwith”. With quality dialogue and story-telling like that, you kind of know what you’re getting into within this movie’s first 15 minutes.

That wouldn’t be so bad if Hypnotic leant more into its ludicrous premise – as I genuinely like the goofy pleasures of Jumper and The Adjustment Bureau (starring Affleck’s other half Matt Damon) – but this is all far too dull and solemn.

The narrative continues with the hunt for a destructive MacGuffin weapon and beats that hark to Total Recall and even Affleck’s own duffer Paycheck (2003) with a memory wipe/bread-crumbs-left tale of mind control.

Some city-bending and train-twisting has echoes of Inception and Tenet but this is very much Christopher Nolan if you ordered him from wish.com

Affleck and Rodriguez have both had patchy careers with Affleck supplementing his Oscar-winning films with dreck like Deep Water and Triple Frontier whilst Rodriguez’s Spy Kids sequels and Alita: Battle Angel hardly set my world alight. And to be honest, this is another misstep for both of them.

Directed, written, photographed, storyboarded, edited, music composed by and the film also produced by only members of the Rodriguez family, perhaps the household ties meant they had a hard time with honest feedback. I just hoped one of them would have said to the other, "are we sure this isn't too tedious?"

It does have a few charms I suppose. The cinematography is pretty decent and has a better movie quality than some recent TV-looking releases (including Affleck’s own Michael Jordan shoe-story Air). And the far-too-sparse action moments entertain when they eventually do arrive. But beyond that it’s not got any real spark at all and its silly dreams within dreams is a load of psychic mumbo-jumbo.

So with a host of clichés and mostly an atmosphere of dullness, Hypnotic is not the least bit spellbinding and one you may want to disassociate yourself from by putting it in a memory hole, never to be brought up again.

★★

2/5

Michael Sales