“Hypnotic” (2023)
“Well that’s some pretty impressive mind-reading”.
I was thirty or so minutes into this, Robert Rodriguez’s twenty first feature length release from the directors chair, and I was a worried man. Worry perhaps is too strong a word for it is “just a film” after all, but I did wonder what had happened to the story telling skills of a director I’ve admired since Desperado in 1995. All those long years ago in the halcyon days of the mid 1990’s I went back immediately to his 1992 debut El Mariachi, marvelled at the ludicrous and outlandish From Dusk Till Dawn, then avoided the Spy Kids franchise, adored Once Upon a Time in Mexico (see also Sin City, Machete and Planet Terror) and liked but was not won over by Alita: Battle Angel in 2019. This was also my first opportunity to list the above films and Robert Rodriguez’s on-going cinematic love affair with Quentin Tarantino as I watched Alita with my son at the cinema, the first of his films to receive the royal family assent. No cinema outing this time but I did stumble over his latest release and with Ben Affleck in the lead role and the premise and promise of a “secret government program” I was in.
Then half an hour later I was almost out.
Almost.
“Danny Rourke” (Ben Affleck) Rourke is a Police Detective ravaged by the living nightmare of seeing his daughter snatched in broad daylight by a man who professes to remember nothing of the incident whatsoever. With his daughter still missing and detective work being the only realm of “sanity” he can cling to, Rourke stumbles over a secret government programme known as “Project Domino”, and a secret world of “hypnotics” who quickly and simply re-shape and re-programme the world and reality surrounding them.
Supporting Affleck’s central role are two important portrayals from Alice Braga as “Diana Cruz” and William Fichtner as “Lev Dellrayne” and the rest will fall into place if, like me, you persist past the opening 30 rather bland and uninteresting minutes.
I scribbled “Inception” in my notes, but only as an aide-memoire. It’s certainly not a memento mori but rather an ode to the importance of family and the unreliability of memories and almost a good movie.
Almost.
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