HYPNOTIC

Hypnotic is a film that will remind you of what has come before. But this does not, as will become apparent, mean that it is somehow timeless, or that is paying homage to its inspirations. It means that if you look in Hypnotics rear view mirror you will see the carcasses of a dozen or so other films, from which it has ruthlessly scavenged.

Ben Affleck plays troubled cop - is the any other kind of cop in Hollywood? - Danny Rourke who, on his firstly back on the job, picks up a case that with thrust him back into his past traumas, and into a world of danger, as he fights to discover all he can about powerful new enemy, and the disappearance of his daughter some years earlier.

Sound familiar?

You might be forgiven, after reading this synopsis, for thinking that Rourke might spend the film doing some actual detective work.

But no.

He spends the majority of the run time blundering around aimlessly, showing nothing of his past experiences in the force, each clue either being dropped in his lap, or being ascertained from the copious amounts of poorly written exposition on offer.

He is set up to be a talented, yet ruthless, detective who will stop at nothing to solve a case (sound familiar? I’ll stop now, but really, does it?), but here he spends the majority of his time merely following people who already know more than him.

Affleck himself is going through a bit of a career resurgence at the minute, but here seems bored by everything that’s happening. It’s a performance that makes me think he was just obliged to be there in order to get the funding to make something else.

The rest of the cast are… also just kind of there. There are no particularly bad performances, but everything just feels very mechanical, with everyone just doing the bare minimum they needed to get the film made.

But I find it difficult to put blame on the actors for this, as the writing is so poor. Each character is as one-note as the next, meaning no one really has anything to play with.

As the film progresses there are some twists - as is to be expected - but the less said about them the better.

A good twist should be surprising in the moment, but on reflection should make sense. And therein lies the rub, because nothing about Hypnotic makes sense.

There is one fun heist based set piece near the start which threatens to set up something interesting, but once the film begins to explain itself, you really begin to wish that it hadn’t.

Its central premise works, but once you start to peel back it's layers everything starts to fall apart, leaving behind a quagmire of lore for the audience to wade through. Any hope of there being something interesting on the other side waning by the minute.

Rebel Rodriguez’s score manages to be both intrusive and uninteresting. Where a film score should be comfortable playing second fiddle - only really becoming apparent on a second or third viewing - here it seems to be constantly fighting for centre stage (though by fighting I mean it is less bare-knuckle boxing, and more drunk da’s on Facebook at 2am. A lot of noise without either side ever having the inclination to actually throw a punch).

It borrows and steals from other sci-fi films until what you’re left with is a mishmash of compositions that we have all heard before, adding to the overall blandness of the films world.

In front of the camera or behind it, nobody involved in the making of this film seemed to be overly interested in the final product.

I went into Hypnotic hoping for some dumb fun sci-fi, but whatever fun exists disappears once you get into the nitty gritty of the world.

The central idea has potential, but it is weighed down by clunky dialogue, by-the-numbers performances, and some plot points that border on stupidity.

Hypnotic clearly wants to be an Inception-like twisty sci-fi film but it lacks any of the intrigue, tension or writing that made Christopher Nolans 2010 hit such an influential phenomenon.

It is ultimately a frankensteins monster of a film that outstays its welcome by a good forty-five minutes (and when it’s only 90 minutes to begin with, this is a problem). It takes almost everything it has from other, better, films, and tries to mash them all together in the vain hope of making something coherent.

It fails at this.

While Inception still elicits conversation over a decade after its release, it is going to take some extremely powerful hypnosis to make this one live long in the memory.