There’s a reason the new Ben Affleck vehicle Hypnotic starts out seeming like a shitty detective movie from the 1990s where the detective’s daughter is kidnapped. It’s part of the movie’s grand design to begin by deceiving us. Learning this in a review, though, does not help you get through the shitty detective movie from the 1990s part any better, nor does knowing that the film undergoes a change contain the sort of rewards you might traditionally expect.

Even when Robert Rodriguez’ film becomes distinctly high concept, it is a muddled, convoluted affair whose centre does not hold. This is not new territory for Affleck, who about every five years has made some kind of misfired thriller in which he’s channelling his inner Jimmy Stewart. The howlingly awful John Woo movie Paycheck is one such example. It’s somewhat new territory for Rodriguez, whose own misfires at least contain bursts of colour and energy and weirdness. This is flat and grey and inert, and even when it’s trying to remind you of a movie like Inception, it’s dead on the page.

Hypnotic is actually high concept pretty much from the start. It concerns human beings who possess the gift of mind control, who are called hypnotics – lest you thought that title was an adjective. (And if it were an adjective, the only sort of hypnosis the film might perform is putting you to sleep.) Affleck’s detective Danny Rourke, a member of the Austin police department, has been trying to return to work following bereavement leave over the kidnapping from a park and presumed death of his daughter, Minnie. The kidnapper claims he doesn’t remember that day’s events and has no knowledge of Minnie’s whereabouts.

That story starts to gain credence when Rourke crosses paths with Lev Dellrayne (William Fichtner) during a bank robbery, which Rourke and his partner Nicks (J.D. Pardo) try to intercept after receiving a tip-off that it’s about to occur. Dellrayne seems interested only in the contents of a single safe deposit box, but he’s willing to go to any lengths to get it – including leaving bodies in his wake, and whispering commands to people in the area and at the bank to help him carry off the theft. Under his hypnosis, they are powerless to do anything but the thing he asks.

As it becomes clear this investigation may intertwine with his daughter’s disappearance, Rourke hooks up with an actual practising hypnotist – you know, the one with the shop in the seedy neighbourhood – called Diana Cruz (Alice Braga). She’s got the same power as Dellrayne, and the fact that Rourke seems impervious to their abilities may be key to why his daughter was kidnapped.

Affleck’s on-again, off-again partner Jennifer Lopez, currently on again, released her own new thriller on Netflix on the same date that Hypnotic debuted in cinemas. While that film (The Mother) has succeeded on streaming, this film has tanked at the box office, and it’s another one of those ominous signs that only a very particular sort of cinematic event has any business appearing on the big screen. To be sure, The Mother is a better film than Hypnotic, but Hypnotic might have come across more successfully to us if our expectations were lowered to the level of a movie on a streaming service to which we already subscribe. By asking us to pay money to see Hypnotic – which would have been a no-brainer just a decade ago – the distributor is dooming this movie to seeming even less than what it is.

There should be something here. The idea of malicious people controlling minds for unknown purposes, and us getting to experience some of their visions, should be fertile enough, even though it’s pretty Shyamalan adjacent. The other person it’s adjacent to is Christopher Nolan, as we’ve already suggested through the Inception comparison, so yes, pursue a good version of Hypnotic please.

Rodriguez and Affleck don’t. They’re giving us such a lacklustre version of this material that it feels like a sort of forgery, a knock-off of a genuine brand sold in a dodgy market. Affleck’s performing style isn’t helping matters. It isn’t spoiling too much to say that his character is a part of the movie’s narrative shift, and the way he handles it is clumsy at best. Not to get all rhyming here, but Affleck’s affect is all wrong. And his inscrutable choices leave us less certain we’re following the twists and turns the story is starting to throw at us.

What’s worse, everyone is so glum and dour. Where’s the fun, Robert Rodriguez? It may be unfair to measure this version of Rodriguez against the guy who legendarily financed El Mariachi from the loose change between his couch cushions, since that was more than 30 years ago. And if it were just him reaching a director-for-hire stage of his career that is the great equaliser between one-time phenoms, that would be understandable. But in addition to directing, Rodriguez wrote, produced, shot and edited Hypnotic. Which means that when identifying whom to blame for it, there’s nowhere else to turn.

 

Hypnotic is currently playing in cinemas.