Hypnotic - Review Thread

This movie… doesn’t feel like it should exist. The film sort of came out of nowhere in May and was dumped into theaters with minimal advertising by the heretofore largely unknown distributor Ketchup Entertainment to disastrous results. The movie made $8 million dollars on a budget of $65 million and I can’t help but wonder how such a large investment was so recklessly squandered. Well, clearly what happened on some level is that the people involved looked at the finished movie, decided it was doomed, and then decided it wasn’t worth dumping marketing dollars into. Perhaps the bigger question is why so much was invested in this in the first place because, if not for the presence of people like Ben Affleck, Alice Braga, and Jackie Earle Haley in front of the camera and the presence of Robert Rodriguez behind the camera and the slightly elevated budget I’d almost think this was some sort of direct to video “mockbuster” ripoff of Inception released by a company like The Asylum. Well, maybe that’s a little too mean. There are flashes here of a better movie that looks to combine noir tropes with a potentially workable science fiction story about mind control but the movie just never really comes to life. The characters are totally stock and the script is absolutely not “blowing your mind” like it thinks it is. This was just a waste of time for all involved though it’s oddly in keeping with the Robert Rodriguez’s bizarrely inconsistent career as a filmmaker.