Hypnotic is a sci-fi action thriller following Ben Affleck trying to find the man he thinks abducted his daughter. He goes up against a hypnotic (William Fichtner) and discovers that everything is not as he believes it is. I’m sorry for that basic tagline. It is really hard to describe the movie without spoiling it.
I’ll be honest, I did not really care for this movie when I saw the trailer. At first, the premise seemed cool: a man can warp a person’s perception of reality to influence them to do what he wants. But it gets old so fast when Fichtner keeps popping up and adding conflict. It all changes in the second half, but still.
Before getting into the story, I want to address the thought that stuck with me in the movie. This felt exactly like a Christopher Nolan movie if you asked AI to craft it from start to finish. I don’t mean to disrespect Robert Rodriguez but it felt like he watched Memento and Inception and tried to combine them. Hypnotic has its own story and it’s not necessarily bad, it was just something I couldn’t stop thinking about.
This movie required a lot of buy-in from me. The cat and mouse game the cop and bad guy play was super formulaic. Even when they both seemed to be the cat and the mouse, it was incredibly predictable, down to the action one-liners the characters would say. At the midpoint, there is a twist that makes things much more interesting, but I honestly was teetering the line of checking out by that point.
There were definitely some good elements to this movie, however. Even if it felt like a Nolan movie, the visuals were still pretty solid. The ending gets super dark which I liked as it really wasn’t something I would’ve expected from the movie. Again, once the story’s cat-and-mouse game aspect ended, I found it much more entertaining. Rodriguez included a lot of subtle hints along the way that indicated that something about the situation was off. As I stew on the movie back at home, I can appreciate the crumbs that were left that I didn’t pick up on in the movie.
Final Thoughts
Hypnotic is a movie that, in my opinion, wastes its first half with a generic structure. It gets better as the movie moves away from that, but it felt like it was too little too late. It feels like a B-action movie that will struggle to be memorable as more movies like Mission Impossible come out.
