5/10 Hypnotic, writer/cinematographer/editor/director/producer Robert Rodriguez’ sci-fi/noir action thriller starring Ben Affleck may have been a box office bomb and an objectively bad film, but it’s still a guilty pleasure of mine. I know now that it’s a cheap knockoff of Memento and The Matrix that has so much overlap with Inception as to be completely eclipsed by it, but I can’t help it! I have such strong memories from when I saw it first in 2003.

Sorry, that’s a typo – I meant 2023. This movie just came out.

Austin, Texas, summer- Austin Police Department Det. Danny Rourke (Affleck) is in occupational therapy to recover from the abduction of his 7-year-old daughter and subsequent divorce. Soon after he leaves the office, a bank robber called Dellrayne (William Fichtner), who seems to be able to command bystanders to do his bidding, implies that he knows where Rourke’s daughter is. Rourke descends into a world of “hypnotics,” powerful government-trained psychics, hoping to find his daughter.

Hypnotic is a surprisingly powerful movie about the sensation of being lost in a maze that you eventually discover never had an exit, but not nearly as effective as it might be. Film is the only possible medium to portray the sudden shifts in reality its characters experience, but Rodriguez wants too badly for it to also be an action film. Instead of subtly betraying Rourke’s senses, he uses bombastic camera distortions that make the whole thing look like a cut-rate version of Inception, complete with a near-constant techno drumbeat that sounds like a pre-purchased after-effect more than its own idea and a much worse digital version of that iconic city-folding shot.

It all comes together to seem like a geezer teaser, one of those junk Redbox movies billed on an aging star with Affleck descending early into this stage of his career, a fate that fits his combination of ego and flashpan marketability too perfectly for him to avoid it, but it’s actually a $65 million passion project that Rodriguez, who is still one of the most important names in turn-of-the-century cinema, has been trying to get off the ground for 20 years after writing the first draft of the screenplay in 2002.

Like all trashy neo-noirs, Hypnotic is a lot deeper than it might seem – the genre that plays so much with lighting and urban alienation can’t help it. This film is a deep dive into the delicacy of human identity, first isolating Rourke with a lost daughter and a failed marriage and then revealing more and more of what he thinks in the film’s first scene to be the product of hypnotic suggestion. Everything we learn about what’s happening onscreen must be re-learned two or three times, and while that might have a numbing effect in a lesser film, signaling viewers to not pay attention to its twists because they don’t seem to matter, Hypnotic layers the twists together to create a sense of uncertainty. The malleability is the point, not the details themselves.

The film seeds in maze and domino imagery right from the first moments and forces viewers to pay attention to the minute details of Rourke’s physical experiences, which is also important because of Affleck’s muted performance. As always, he seems to be giving absolutely everything he has to a low-energy performance, but Rodriguez’ direction and editing let him down. 

It’s not a high-quality movie. There seems to be so much motion smoothing in some of the action scenes that I suspect they’re playing with high frame rate, which never ever works, but I can’t find any confirmation. There’s a consistent overuse of handheld camerawork and a lot of otherwise unnecessary panning and lifting to give what ought to be a quiet movie an energy that clashes with its story. 

And there is a lot of action. There’s too much action because the action is not good, but also because military MK-Ultra stuff is the wrong lens through which to frame this story. Hypnotic is at its best when it’s a low-octane neo noir, with the psychics using their powers to solve their problems quietly in the shadows. You could make the same movie with just as much conflict, but about a quarter of the gunfire and about a quarter of the time spent explaining the idea.

Despite being shot on-location in Austin in 2021, the film also looks distinctly like it’s set in Austin of 20 years ago, the overgrown suburb of Rodriguez’ youth with both skyscrapers and strip malls that’s still mere minutes from the vast Texan wasteland, not the impenetrable forest of residential towers populated by tech bros tricked by sales pitches about the new Silicon Valley that it is today. Austin has a rich legacy of Generation X filmmakers, the hometown for Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke, alma mater for Rodriguez and Matthew McConaughey and a favorite spot of Quentin Tarantino, who is friends with all of them. For all the annual movies about how Hollywood has changed, Austin is ripe for a film exploring the alienation of Texas’ explosive growth over the past 10 years, and while Rodriguez may not have wanted to make Hypnotic into that film, it feels like a missed opportunity.

Rodriguez is a crucial part of cinematic history, the poster-boy of the digital revolution in the ‘90s and the patron saint of microbudget filmmakers in his era. In a way, the throughline from Memento and Inception, both made by noted film stock holdout Christopher Nolan, to Hypnotic, which should have released between them but instead comes more than 10 years after Inception, is an epitaph for Rodriguez’ once-new ideas – Nolan did similar effects for Inception in-camera on 35 and 65mm film, and Rodriguez’ digital replication of the same effects, which once represented a lifeline to filmmakers who couldn’t afford to work with film, 13 years after the prior movie and 15 years into the process of a monopolistic studio beating digital filmmaking techniques into a production line, looks like it belongs in a straight-to-VHS knockoff.

Five logos I’ve never seen before in my life run ahead of Hypnotic, including some for companies that have dissolved since lending it their funding, the remnants of the film’s wild, twisting path to set and eventually to screen. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that Rodriguez is still having trouble getting his films funded, especially given how much of his prior work was funded by various offshoots and predecessors of The Weinstein Company, which obviously wasn’t available.

Still making movies at 54, Rodriguez may not have another lifeline like that available. His destiny may well be to make films distributed by something called Ketchup Entertainment or Netflix. His second-direct to streaming feature, Spy Kids: Armageddon, is set to drop later this year.

Leopold Knopp is a UNT graduate. If you liked this post, you can donate to Reel Entropy here. Like Reel Entropy on Facebook and reach out to me at reelentropy@gmail.com.