THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WE CAN AVOID
We remember, one day, having seen Ben Affleck in a good film, and even a great one: it was Gone Girl (2014), a masterpiece by David Fincher, who understood everything about his actor: his bovine eye, his clumsy acting, this way – even from the front – of being as expressive as a back. And for all emotion, an eternal frown. Affleck or the great lost of Hollywood cinema, that’s what Fincher had brilliantly understood. We will not say as muchHypnotica B-movie as it always comes out in the middle of summer, and of which it is difficult to understand who the target audience for this kind of aberration may well be – apart from a few air conditioning profiteers.
At the helm, Robert Rodriguez (macheteSin City) sympathetic craftsman of a pop work that pays vibrant tribute to a whole memory of cinema. As such, Hypnotic is placed under the patronage of Cold sweat (Vertigo, 1958), by Hitchcock: the story as a machination, a maze of twists arranged by a malevolent intelligence. The film opens with Danny Rourke, a cop in Austin, in the middle of a psychotherapy session, feverishly recalling the day when, in a playground, his 7-year-old daughter was kidnapped. A few seconds of inattention that changed his life.
Back on the field, he and his colleague are warned by an anonymous source of the imminence of a burglary which will take place in a bank of the city. There, they witness a strange phenomenon: a man manages to reach the safe without an ounce of violence, and flees incognito without anything or anyone getting in his way. In the attacked safe, Danny finds a photo of his daughter with the inscription “Find Lev Dellrayne”.
Digital hacks
The viewer will immediately understand everything, but Ben Affleck will put a few more sequences to unravel the mystery, throwing here and there a handful of frowns: the burglar, who calls himself Lev Dellrayne, is a powerful hypnotist trained by a division secret government set up to control people’s minds. If all succumb to the mentalist’s power, luckily the nice cop is immune to him and gently continues his investigation.
The second part inaugurates the unveiling of a machination intimately linked to the disappearance of Danny’s child. Rodriguez is eyeing the side of the mental thrillers of Christopher Nolan, a filmmaker who seems to have opened the floodgates to great scriptwriting and philosophical nonsense. In turn, Hypnotic pretends to ask the question: what is the real? How to distinguish reality from its simulacrum? Digital tweaks come to the rescue of a scenario which, far from finding its unity, crumbles before our eyes: reality is no more than a landscape in the hands of a special effects technician, coupled with a scenario that accumulates aberrations.
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