Where I Watched It: Peacock
English Audio Description?: Yes
I think Robert Rodriguez has spent the last 13 years working toward trying to make his own inception. The once iconic director has lost a lot of luster recently, which is made very clear by the middling attention Hypnotic received, and the fact that he’s now remaking his own franchise with a new Spy Kids movie at Netflix later this month.
We open on a detective (Affleck), who is in the middle of a therapy session. It seems to go well, and he leaves and meets up with his partner (JD Pardo), and they roll out to their first call. A potential bank robbery. But when Affleck gets there, he sees things that can’t be explained, except this is also where he meets Human Exposition Device (not her real name, but her entire point in this film is to vomit exposition and context), and once he’s got her on his side, he’s unstoppable. She’s like a human Wikipedia about what weird shit is going down, and lets him (and us) know that the world is not what we believe it to be.
There are hypnotics. They have the ability to enter your brain and create a new reality (sound familiar?), which often gives them control over a person as they convince them to do literally anything. For some reason, Affleck is protected, which probably has to do with the nightmares he was mentioning to his therapist. As the film progresses, it has to explain a lot, and it does take a lot of turns to get to the eventual ending. There’s even a mid credits sequence. Rodriguez really believed he had made Inception.
It’s just there can only be one inception, and while I think Ben Affleck and the rest of the cast (which includes William Fictner and Jackie Earle Haley) are all fine, the action has to slow down so much so we can get the exposition in. Instead of creatively weaving the world in through the story, Rodriguez feels the need to explain everything. verbally. It gets monotonous.
But, I can’t say I didn’t experience things that surprised me. He is constantly morphing this world and this film, and even if I would have attacked it differently, I was engaged. it just is one of those films that afterward, you look back on what you just watched, and it all seemed rather pointless.
For example, there’s this concept of sort of Groundhog Daying someone through the same experience, but the people who believe in this concept keep doing everything to the letter, and the result doesn’t change. Why not try a different outcome? Why would intelligent people keep pushing for a different outcome from the same scenario?
Rodriguez in the 90’s was one of the brightest directors to hit the screen. His stock wavered a bit in the 2000’s, and now I can’t even remember the last thing he did before Hypnotic. It’s strange to think that I now live in a world where Affleck isn’t the problem, but Rodriguez and his self indulgent chase of Inception is.
The audio description is good. It’s actually the guy who also narrates Tulsa King, which was the worst audio description I heard in 2022 that was not AI. But, here, the quality of his sound is mixed well, and his voice is a strong choice for a science fiction mystery. This is a film where Rodriguez is revealing things to you in a very particular order, and some things aren’t important when first mentioned, but become more important later, and that isn’t ruined ever by the audio description trying to make something feel more significant before it needs to be.
in a Rotten/Fresh world, I’d lean slightly Fresh, as I was engaged for the runtime of the film. However, this movie is like the equivalent of having a good meal that you regret later through some acid reflux. Was it really worth it? That’ll be up to the person to decide if the food was worth the reflux, just like you’ll have to decide if being temporarily interested will be enough when you finally know what this film is. I can’t spoil it for you.
Final Grade: C+
