Hypnotic

Last weekend, Hypnotic, a new detective thriller starring Ben Affleck, was released in theaters. Hypnotic follows detective Danny Rourke as he investigates a mystery involving his missing daughter. As events begin to unfold, he uncovers a secret government agency that runs a group of people known as hypnotics. I was interested after seeing the trailer. The premise sounded really interesting and I really enjoy Ben Affleck as an actor. I was expecting a pretty average cop thriller with a unique hypnotic aspect added on.

This movie was a mixed bag for me. I thought the general premise was very interesting with the idea being that this detective has to hunt down a guy that can influence people with hypnotics. I also found the first 2/3rds of this film to be very thrilling. There were some very exciting sequences and it was really thrilling to struggle to tell what was real and what was just the villain influencing our characters. I also thought the movie did a decent job of establishing this concept of hypnotics. It addresses what hypnotics is, who the villain is, and how people get trained in hypnotics. I also really enjoyed the detective story aspect of it. Where our characters have to follow clues to piece together how to stop our villain. The movie as a whole reminded me a lot of Minority Report in both its story and overall tone. Overall, this movie does a good job of supplying 2/3rds of a decent cop thriller.

However, this movie really falls apart in the third act of the film. There is a significant turning point in the movie that turns the whole premise on its head and this is where the movie just really goes downhill. It tries to achieve a big reveal third act but instead ends up coming across incredibly stupid. The movie kind of drops the whole cop thriller vibe and ends up becoming this whole over-the-top escape film. It keeps trying to do bigger reveals but each reveal ends up being even more stupid than the last. To the extent that when the movie was done, I thought to myself "Well that was just dumb". Before this third act, I was tracking to give this movie a positive review but the direction they took at the end of the film really dropped this movie significantly for me. It tries to pull off a mix of Inception and Shutter Island but fails in both aspects. A couple of smaller issues I had with the film were that the two main characters really lacked any sort of chemistry and that they went a little too deep in the weeds on the explanation of things at the beginning of the film.

In the end, this was a film that had a promising first two acts but then really falls apart and fails to stick the landing in the final third of the film. I can appreciate that it tried to do something different but it just really didn't work for me.

Score: 5/10 Grade: C Recommendation: Skip this one.