“Don’t fear, I’m not Bunco,” Ben Affleck declares early within the tiring new thriller Hypnotic. The phrase is classic US slang for the fraud squad. His character, unsmiling cop Danny Rourke, makes use of the phrase whereas visiting what the film has simply referred to as a “dime-store psychic”. The language suggests time journey again to the golden age of noir, or no less than a film enjoyable sufficient to kill 93 minutes. Curb your enthusiasm. Affleck is, as so usually, the improper actor for enjoyable.
From the outset of this would-be mind-bender, Detective Rourke is haunted by the kidnapping of his younger daughter. The scene is captured in flashback; the size of private tragedy by the star’s default dull-eyed peevishness. However the story shifts gear when he stumbles into the world of “hypnotics” — in essence, steroidal hypnotists who can puppet-master strangers with a single significant glare. Come on! Image the mad Hitchcock excessive jinks a film may rise up to with that premise.
Maintain picturing them too, as a result of regardless of aiming for a tone of the knowingly outlandish, Robert Rodriguez’s film is leaden to the final. The temper is gun-happy and conspiracy-minded, however the true killer is what appears like 80 per cent of the operating time being spent with Affleck and co-stars standing in rooms explaining the plot.
“He erased his personal thoughts?” He did. “Hypnotics did this?” Certainly. “Are we even actually right here?” Someone name Bunco.
★★☆☆☆
In UK cinemas from Might 26