Hypnotic: It's Atrociously Horrid

There are bad movies, and then there are bad movies. I've handed out plenty a negative review in my day, but truth be told, true 1/5 (2/10) movies are far, far rarer than the Google Audience Rating Summary would have you believe. But that doesn't mean that they don't exist, and every so often, I'm painfully reminded of that fact. Enter 2023's Hypnotic. To paint you a cover as if it were a book, Hypnotic is a horrible movie, the cinematic equivalent of listening to a 5-year-old who thinks he's Louis Armstrong technically play the Trumpet. What's worse, this movie thinks it's a lot better than it actually is, and so every eardrum-incinerating note that it plays is played with the utmost sincerity. I don't think that negative is a strong enough word. Consider this article a warning.

I felt conflicted about the visual approach of Hypnotic, and unfortunately, this is nearly the very best thing I have to say about the whole affair. The lens choice of Robert Rodriguez - who pulled double duty as director and co-cinematographer with Pablo Berron - is intriguing, and the Panasonic T-Series lens does occasionally make good use of a limited field of focus. And so it's a shame that the color grading in this movie is so unforgivably ugly, casting the world in an extremely out-of-place hue that seems to exist for the sake of existing. Accompanying these lackluster visuals was a nonstop and painfully digital score that I constantly found myself wishing would stop. Hypnotic sounds like a cable-aired episode of NCIS, and not in a good way.

In the realm of storytelling, it was apparent to me that the the filmmakers had heard of the rule of show don't tell, but their amateur use of the technique was so incredibly obvious, lazy, and heavy-handed. The story itself doesn't flow so much as it does make occasional pronouncements with the intent of moving the story forward. It drops easy and almost-careless expositional sentences like Washington State drops rain - nonstop and indiscriminate. Worse, the movie isn't far off from being a lazy clone of Inception, and this fact was so apparent to me that I even came up with a quip while I was watching it: Hypnotic is what materializes when Batman vs Superman and Inception to have a baby - a mentally challenged baby with a hopelessly elevated sense of self. It's trying so hard to be unusual but ends up being similar to other mind-bending dramas because of it. It doesn't play second fiddle so much as it does frantically create a small, one-instrument cacophony in the aisles of the concert hall while the real orchestra plays on the stage.

Part of Hypnotic is set in Mexico. Maybe I just got spoiled by the intense and expertly crafted realism of Sicario, or maybe I just got turned off by the fact that Mexico is so obviously a studio backlot in Hypnotic - an oddly cliche backlot at that. The contact our heroes are meeting in Mexico even looks like Charles Xavier from the X-Men franchise, confirming to me the fact that this movie doesn't even have the decency to be anything more than a Worst Hits collection of other, far better mind-bending dramas. Making matters even worse, the micro-level production design in this movie is distracting. I noticed a newspaper tacked to the wall bearing a logo that reads World News. The problem? The font in the logo was a cheap imitation of The New York Post. But maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm the only one bothered by this.

Now, amidst all the negativity in this article, there is one sequence in this movie that I did like, a sequence that, while admittedly hammy, does create a fleetingly effective sense of helplessness, almost as if the rest of this hapless movie was made with this one scene in mind. Sadly, this brief positive doesn't last long at all, and while it's not entirely unexpected, the heavy, heavy third-act exposition in Hypnotic lands with a loud, disappointing, meaningless thump that subverts everything that came before in the laziest and most pointless of ways - and it doesn't just do this once. No, it insists on upending itself multiple times in multiple ways, undoing the messy knot it had just spent the last hour and a half trying to tie.

Hypnotic isn't just bad. No, it can feel narratively hostile at times. Many of its filmmaking strategies are utterly antithetical to the idea of a mysterious three-act story, and its last-minute allusion to a potential sequel feels less like a promise and more like a threat. Hypnotic isn't even a very original movie and is perfectly content to badly trace art that came before it without bothering to create something, anything artistically captivating. It's easily one of the worst movies I've seen this year, and if my IMDb ratings are any indicator to go by, one of the worst movies I've ever seen. It doesn't even have the manners to be insincere. It accomplishes nothing throughout its runtime and then has the audacity to take what little it actually accomplished completely seriously.

Hypnotic - 2/10

Romans 8:5-8