A movie constructed to be its own spoiler, Robert Rodriguez’s new potboiler, Hypnotic, may be the only film ever made to frame itself as perfectly awful Hollywood junk in its first half, in order to pull back the curtains and reveal itself, ta-da, as merely mediocre Hollywood junk in its second. It’s not complicated, and here’s the spoilage: Everything that stuffs the movie’s first 45 minutes, including Ben Affleck’s brooding dimness as a dumbfounded detective grieving his kidnapped daughter, is not “real” but “virtual,” in the old-school Philip K. Dick way, manufactured within the story by nefarious means but executed in the pandering, good-enough manner of so many ’80s–’90s movies conceived by studio executives like Joel Silver. Is it sucking on purpose? you ask, and the answer is Yup. In fact, the cheesy badness of the film’s Act I rivals Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror” half of Grindhouse (2007) for deliberate stupidity, if not for laughs.
Spoiler or not, knowing about this “gotcha” charade is the only reason to watch. Not that Rodriguez’s switcheroo Act II is so brilliant — movies with “twists” presumably often look good on paper, but onscreen they’re usually as much fun as being hit with a water balloon. Affleck, in a fog through both halves, appears to be simply waiting for the overexplained plot to sort itself out, so he can go home. At first, he’s that cop on the trail of weird bank-robber hypnotist William Fichtner, catching bizarre clues pointing to his daughter’s whereabouts and encountering the occasional Inception-style curving-city hallucination, leading us to think that he and we might all be not merely stuck in a dream, but a dream written and directed by mockbuster hacks like The Asylum (y’know, Transmorphers, Pirates of Treasure Island, etc.).
Rodriguez, who more or less disappeared into his own cheesy vortex of kids’ movies and Star Wars TV shows years ago, isn’t such a reliable ironist that…
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