#20: HYPNOTIC

 

Starring Ben Affleck, Alice Braga, J.D. Pardo, William Fichtner. Written by Robert Rodriguez and Max Borenstein and directed by Robert Rodriguez. Budget $65 million. Running time 94 minutes all too long.

It's the Poundland reimagining of Inception, right down to the city folding over on itself. Imagine an enigma wrapped up in a puzzle shoved up the arse of a dead donkey and you're still nowhere near how staggering dull, bland and boring this film actually is. Indeed it's almost as boring as Ben Affleck's performance.

Affleck plays Danny Rourke an Austin detective whose daughter was abducted years previously, which in turn leads to the collapse of his marriage. Anyway, some time later he returns to active duty and gets involved in a bank heist with a mysterious man Dell Rayne (William Fichtner) who's been orchestrating a series of mysterious bank robberies involving ordinary people acting mysteriously out of character. This leads to a Diana Cruz (Alice Braga) a psychic with a mysterious past and a mysterious links to Dell Rayne and a mysterious organisation called Division which was running a mysterious program that harnessed the mysterious abilities of hypnotics like the mysterious Dell Rayne. What this has to do with the mystery of Danny and his missing daughter, and wife will slowly becomes clear, that is if you make it through the 94 minutes it takes to get to the bland answer that's all too obvious if you've seen enough of this sort of film. 

To call Affleck's acting in this 'sleep-walking' is to insult narcoleptics the world over. Indeed I don't think he could have conveyed his utter boredom with the subject material any better than he does, indeed if there was an Oscar and an Olympic medal for acting bored he'd win both. 

That action is lamentable too and so lack lustre that one car chase actually involved a slow speed golf cart buggy. That coupled with generic shootouts and some laugh-out-loud dialogue and action beats moments and you're in for a movie you'll barely remember two minutes after you've left the theatre.

The plot uses reveals and twists to propel the narrative, with each new twist arriving every few minutes and more ridiculous than the last until the very end when the whole film comes to a beautiful and gentle full-stop after a slow roll down a light incline and the final twist is revealed and you think, 'oh'. 

A shocking last act mass-shooting scene feels very uncomfortable, especially in the light of the relentless series of mass shootings that plague America.

Can't think of a single thing to recommend this. Quite literally the dullest film I've seen in an absolute age. And this from a director who once gave us the likes of El Mariachi, Sin City and Planet Terror.

3/10