Ugh. I just noticed this on Netflix, and from the preview it looked like an intriguing thriller with sci-fi elements. Ben Affleck is hit-or-miss in stuff, and the female lead is Alice Braga, who I was vaguely aware had been in some good stuff in the past. So Mrs. solost and I watched it Saturday night.
Wow, was it bad. I was going to start a public service thread with the title “Save yourself an hour and a half of your life and don’t watch Hypnotic” if a thread had not already been started.
Here’s a capsule plot review so you can get an idea how bad the movie is without wasting ~90 minutes of your life:
Affleck is a detective who had his daughter kidnapped under his nose in a park years ago. Jeez, great detective, right?
In his continuing search for what happened to her, he encounters a guy who has these super-hypnotic powers that allow him to make other people do all kinds of bad stuff, which he frequently does, like rob banks and then kill themselves.
He comes across a clue- a polaroid pic of his daughter with a name written on it that he assumes is the name of super-hypno dude (Lev something). Then he meets a psychic (Braga) who explains that some people, like ‘Lev’, are ‘hypnotics’ who can do that mind control voodoo.
But that was all a fake-out! It turns out that Affleck and Braga were both hypnotics, married to each other, and were members of a super-secret agency called The Institute, where everybody wears red blazers, as if they were all RE/Max realtors. They had a daughter, who The Agency wanted to take away from them and train her so they could take over the world or something, because she was the most super-duper hypnotic of all. So Affleck hid her and wiped his memory clean so he couldn’t reveal her location. The agency, with Braga’s help (traitor!) hypnotized him into thinking he’s a detective whose daughter was kidnapped so he would reveal her hiding place. So all the hypnotized bank-robbing & murdering in Act I never actually happened.
But-- double fake-out!! The ‘Lev Something’ name on the polaroid was actually an anagram for the name of the street where Affleck hid his daughter. Affleck has set up a trap in which the entire Institute shows up, guns a-blazin’, to get the daughter, who had been cared for by Jeff Fahey and some woman, though how Affleck knew and trusted them enough to hide and care for the daughter for 4 years without The Institute also knowing them, was not really made clear. Or maybe I was past caring at that point. Affleck hypno-ed The Institute into thinking they were about to get the daughter back, when PSYCH, they were all in a hypno-illusion! The Institute all gets killed off by Fahey and company.
Then-- triple fake-out!!! It turns out that Braga had been in on it the whole time- she had Affleck came up with the idea of hiding the daughter together, then they wiped both their minds and she went back to being a loyal Institute drone so she could be an “inside person”.
Don’t get me wrong- I like a good plot twist as much as the next guy, and I’m fine with sci-fi or supernatural stuff as long as the internal rules of the fictional universe make sense. But this was so nonsensical it was ridiculous. It was as if an 8 year old watched “Memento” and wrote a bad rip-off of it.
