Hypnotic Review: Inception for Dummies

Hypnotic is a boring overplotted rehash of Inception.

Danny Rourke (Ben Affleck), a detective haunted by the abduction of his 7-year-old daughter Minnie (Ionie Olivia), receives an anonymous tip for the latest bank heist in a series of bizarre robberies. The detective finds the targeted safety deposit box and discovers a picture of his daughter. The mastermind behind the plot manages to escape before Rourke can arrest him and find out more about the unsettling coincidence. Determined to find his daughter, the detective is plunged into a world of mind control and government secrets.

Hypnotic has enough interesting elements to make you curious about it. It also helps that it commits to its ridiculous flimsy premise and loosely defined movie logic. Unfortunately, that isn’t enough to save this mediocre film from being a tedious Inception rip-off.

Hypnotic starts off as a police procedural with a sci-fi twist. Not bad if you’re tired of superhero movies that require an encyclopedic knowledge of interconnected franchises to understand. However, as the movie progresses, it piles on twists and turns solely to move from one plot point to another. The script makes no attempt to develop its story, setting, and characters.

It doesn’t help that all of it unravels in a generic and uninspired way. Like every movie with lazy writing, Hypnotic suffers from telling instead showing.  The action scenes aren’t much either, paired with low-budget visual effects where characters stare at warped images of inverted cityscapes.

In one scene, Rourke has a staring contest with a villain.  He *a spoiler that everyone sees coming* discovers he has hypnotic power and uses it to get cops in Mexico to arrest Dellrayne. In this world, hypnotists can alter memories, create illusions, and control a limitless number of people.

Ben Affleck does the bare minimum. To be fair there’s nothing much about his character. The rest of the cast fare better and makes the most of what screen time they’re given.

Eventually, the movie delivers its biggest plot twist, and the true identity of the characters are revealed. Hypnotic ends by explaining everything as if it isn’t predictable and hints at the possibility of a sequel as if Affleck didn’t just sleepwalk in this movie.

It’s a relief to have something else than a superhero movie in the cinema, but Hypnotic should’ve gone straight-to-streaming.