Air, directed by Ben Affleck and starring his friend Matt Damon, is now on Amazon Prime Video. Affleck himself has the lead role in Robert Rodriguez’s latest Hypnotic. One is critically acclaimed. The other, not so much. I’ve been a bit busy of late for a wide variety of reasons, but maybe this is a good weekend to catch up on stuff, and a weekend of Affleck might be fun.
Oh, I started with the one that wasn’t critically acclaimed. Mostly because I am still having a hard time getting into a movie about sneakers.
Austin Police Detective Daniel Rourke (Affleck) is in a deep funk since his young daughter Minnie (Hala Finley) was kidnapped from a local park when he stopped looking for just a moment. But he’s still on the job, and a tip came in that a bank is about to be robbed by a mystery thief who only takes a single, non-monetary item from a random safe deposit box. But the mystery thief, possibly named Lev Dellrayne (William Fitchner), seems to have a lot of people helping him after he speaks to them a bit in code. That name comes from the item in the box, an item Rourke got to first, namely a Polaroid of Rourke’s missing daughter with the words “Find Lev Dellrayne” written on it. While Rourke was able to hold onto the photo, Dellrayne does get away.
A tip leads to one Diana Cruz (Alice Braga), a low level con artist working as a hypnotist and psychic. She explains that Dellrayne, like herself, is something called a “hypnotic,” a powerful psychic with the power to subvert the wills of most people with just a few words and a look in the eye. Dellrayne wants everyone with some knowledge of his existence dead. Or he wants something called Project Domino. He wants something, and he’s always one step behind Rourke and Cruz, leading the two to be on the run from him and law enforcement. Diana can use her own hypnotic skills, but Dellrayne is stronger than she is, and the pair will need to figure out what happened to Rourke’s daughter and what Dellrayne wants before the two of them end up dead.
OK, credit where it’s due: there were a few times during the run of the movie where I thought there was something that seemed like a plot hole, but the movie actually did cover all these things before too long. Essentially, as I saw one review headline say, this is Robert Rodriguez trying to make a Christopher Nolan movie, particularly Inception. Rodriguez, who still does a lot of work behind the scenes including the editing, has proven to be able to make a fun, pulpy movie. I wouldn’t say everything he’s done has been great or anything, but his work does have a certain aura that says the movies work best if you don’t take them too seriously.
Sadly, because this one is trying to be at least a little bit of a dark, Nolan thriller type of movie, it doesn’t quite hit the right tone given the subject matter. This is a movie where a bad guy group looks like they could all work for the same realtor company, and Affleck’s performance consists mostly of a dour facial expression. As I said, the movie does cover all the perceived plot holes, and I can honestly say I didn’t see the answers coming, but something about this one, it just doesn’t have the right tone given the subject matter.
Grade: C
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