Was excited to see this as I enjoy Ben Affleck and Fichtner as actors and Rodriguez occasionally hits a home run but sadly not here. Years of making bad kids movies such as his Soy Kids franchise proves here that Rodriguez no longer has the creative intellect to make an action movie for adults. All the talent in the world can't save the dialogue sounding ridiculous and the premise as great as it sounded on paper / in the trailer is handled really really badly. Its too far fetched for a regular crime drama and isn't fantasy enough from the get go to be taken seriously by any self respecting movie lover. Had Fichtner and Braga's characters been supernatural beings manipulating humans this would have sat better with me but as super mentalists it's just farcical. It takes too long to reveal that this is very much a Sci Fi movie and not a regular crime thriller as suggested in the trailer. We are almost immediately meant to be on board with the fact there are government created David Blain types wandering amongst us with mind control powers and its simply proposterous. What really annoys me about movie making these days is that these things pass through the hands of producers and execs and then multiple test audiences and no one questions the believability of what they are making or if they do they choose to ignore the glaringly obvious flaws and this is exactly why a 65 million dollar movie makes 15 million at the box office. Also where exactly was 65 million spent on this movie? It's pretty effects light and the action set pieces or nothing out of the ordinary. You see similar or better in most TV shows nowadays so I must have gone on salaries as it's certainly not up on the screen. At one point everyone is dressed in red jackets which is the sort of thing you'd see in a student movie that has no budget. It's laughable when it happens and completely unnecessary as a plot device. This could have been a great little sci Fi movie has they just leaned into it and marketed it properly but as it stands it's a big ol' stinker on the Affleck résumé. It's a generous 4.5 stars.
Review of Hypnotic
