"Hypnotic" - Review

Detective Danny Rourke (Ben Affleck) lost his daughter to a kidnapping years ago, and is going to therapy for it. His latest case is that of a strange individual by the name of Dellrayne (William Fichtner, always welcome), who appears to be able to mind control people into doing his bidding. Hot on his tail, Rourke attempts to figure out the mystery of why Dellrayne is stealing random safety deposit boxes, where he got his powers, what he's doing here, and what the hell he has to do with Rourke...

"Paprika" is my favourite movie of all time, and there is something of a fascination in seeing movies which fumble it so badly. What on paper felt like a fun throwback, a stripped back "supernatural serial killer" movie like the exceedingly underrated "Fallen" or that piece of shit "Solace", immediately crumples under a myriad of bad decisions and a script caked in layers of dreadfulness, like Brent Ratner rewrote "Memento" after thinking that "that bit in Inception was so cool, that shit is such a complex movie dude!".
For the first 2 minutes of "Hypnotic" I immediately knew that nothing mattered, an existential despair swallowing me up in the cinema. See, the film plays its card too early: Ben Affleck in therapy, looking out of the window, reminiscing on his tragic past ("Reminiscence" is another one! God, remember that?), and then we get shots of him marching past maze-patterned walls, his daughter in flashbacks telling him her hair is not a braid but a "maize!", and spirals. You end up sat there waiting for when the "it was all a dream!" twist kicks in, and thus you feel absolutely no attachment to the characters. None of this matters, so why are we bothering to care? It's just going to have the rug pulled out of from us anyway... Attempts to be cerebral and "mind blowing" ("Transcendence!" That's another one! Remember that? Jesus...) fall flat, as it wants to be "Inception" when its plotting is "Surrogates" without the charm. There are some flairs (William Fichtner is always excellent, and Jackie Earle Haley is in this for one scene, and does a remarkably good William Fichtner impression, which is one of the most niche talents I have ever witnessed. Touche Jackie!), including in the directing and lighting, but Rodriguez (Oh yeah, it's a Robert Rodriguez movie! I honestly would never have known) and it would have somewhat flourished had it been a stripped back, pulpier, more horror-angled story of how a cop tries to stop a psychic serial killer; but instead escalates and escalates and escalates with revelations less interesting than casting announcements for the humans in a "Transformers" movie. Each one simply makes you think "Why? What is this adding to the story?" And strips the layers of empathy back even further. I kept thinking of better movies, and when the climactic showdown happened on a farm, all I culd think of was "Man, I should read Firestarter again..." and then I remembered the terrible "Firestarter" remake and got sad...
It's a rather dull movie too: do you know how dull you have to be in order to have your villains dressed as Butlin's redcoats be an afterthought?
The best part of the film is a line early on where, due to Alice Braga's accent and delivery, "The synapses start to collapse" reads instead as:
"The synopsis starts to collapse!"
And that says it all really.