In short: Hypnotic (2023)

Police detective Danny Rourke (Ben Affleck) stumbles upon a very curious case: a sinister looking gentleman (William Fichtner) somehow convinces random civilians into helping him commit complicated and suicidal robberies. Even more curious: all of this seems somehow connected to the kidnapping of Rourke’s little daughter by another random stranger some time ago.

Before Rourke knows it, he is teaming up with a backstreet hypnotist (Alice Braga) and starts following the trail of a weird conspiracy surrounding an operation of government mind controllers with a deep love for red blazers.

Clearly, Robert Rodriguez didn’t go into this trying to make your bog standard contemporary action thriller but mixes it up with the traditions of the 70s paranoid thriller, as well as some X-Men style not quite superhero psi stuff. In the film’s good moments, this works out rather well. Particularly early on, before the film starts to explain way too much, Rodriguez regularly reaches an un-real and somewhat nightmarish mood of paranoia – the culmination here is certainly the scene in the police station where our hero gets in trouble with his partner, though there is also a really nice bit where Rourke finds himself mind-whammied into a murder attempt.

The more standard big budget action thriller elements never work out quite as well: the action is – atypical for Rodriguez – more competent than great, and the plot never quite has the drive it should have. On the other hand, Hypnotic pulls off its two big twists rather well, including a pretty clever sequence of reveals too fun to spoil here. I can take or leave the final one, however.

I do believe Hypnotic’s main problem is its lead actor. Affleck’s unwillingness or inability to express any human emotion beyond indigestion is of course legend by now, but it’s poison for any emotional effect the film should have on its audience. On paper, Rourke goes through a psychological and physical wringer, and it should be easy to make us sympathize with him and his plight, perhaps admire his gumption. Alas, Affleck doesn’t express any of this, leaving a vacuum where Hypnotic’s emotional heart should be.

That the film stays watchable throughout is a little wonder; though the kind of wonder that makes me particularly wistful for a better casting decision.

Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

I went in expecting nothing whatsoever from the Robert Rodriguez directed, James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis written manga adaptation, and went out pretty happy with a very satisfying bit of big budget cyberpunk action cinema. Now, the usual critics will offer the usual complaint that the film uses well-worn tropes in a plot very much written to the still most popular structural model in modern blockbuster pop cinema. These gals and guys are only half wrong, for the film is indeed filled with genre tropes and does indeed follow a certain Blockbuster plotting 101 philosophy. However, you can use well-worn clichés with a sense of joy (and perhaps even a bit of intelligence); the standard blockbuster plot style exists in so many movies because it actually works very well inside the genres these films usually belong to. And really, all jokes about plot structure timed to the second in today’s mainstream cinema aside, there’s always wriggle room to do something interesting or weird in seemingly rigid structures.

What I am obviously leading up to is this: sure, Alita is full of variations on stuff you’ve heard and seen explode on a screen many times before, but it does more often than not use these elements with such joy and abandon that originality simply doesn’t come into play when you’re actually willing to watch the film instead of trying to watch it antagonistically (which is not the same as watching critically, whatever parts of the internet and the critical classes may believe); and while the film’s structure is indeed well-worn by now, the script really flows and works very well inside this structure. Rodriguez also manages to create a world weird enough to be appropriate to the manga it adapts, where a cameo by Jeff Fahey and his cyborg dogs (potential band name ahoy!) isn’t just a fun aside but also makes sense as a part of the film’s highly strange world. The trick here is that Rodriguez never seems to have accepted the idea that there’s a strict dividing line between the goofy and the cool, and so can pick and mix from both sides of this arbitrary divide, put the fun stuff on screen and let the audience decide to either enjoy themselves or find all of this very silly indeed. Me, I’m with the enjoyment.

This doesn’t mean the film is absolutely brain dead and only there to put its – actually pretty damn awesome – production design in your face. There’s some obvious (and obviously underplayed, no surprise given that this is mass market entertainment made for a giant company) business about class divisions and what the incessant want to need to make it big to escape them does to people. The film also manages to hit its emotional beats about the travails of a young heroine to define herself and her own destiny, as clichéd as they are, with great conviction, providing the film with a degree of mainstream feminist heft in the process. Plus, on a more technical level, the script does ably deliver exposition and world building, even a handful of flashbacks, in a way that feels organic instead of tedious, something I particularly appreciate after I’ve suffered through the new Hellboy movie.

Also pretty fun is how easily the film convinces us of the tiny Alita with the weird CGI face as an ass-kicking heroine who becomes more fun to watch the longer the film goes on. That’s not just because this sort of thing is just naturally fun (which proper nerd sides with the big bruiser against a tiny slip of a girl, after all?), but also because Rosa Salazar’s performance, despite that weird decision to CGI away most of her actual face for no good reason, is pretty fantastic for this sort of thing, making Alita feel absurdly grounded and human. In fact, one of the more interesting aspects of the film’s handling of Alita is how little it is interested in this cyborg’s basic humanity – listen to Salazar give even the bad lines of dialogue, and her humanity really isn’t in question at all. The acting’s pretty wonderful for this sort of thing on the whole, with Waltz making a wonderful likeable father figure and looking perfectly dignified when using an absurd manga style weapon, and Jennifer Connelly selling a somewhat underwritten surprise face turn by sheer power of personality. Why, the film’s so good with its actors, I didn’t even mind Ed Skrein, though perhaps because he is the butt of many a violent joke.


Last but not least, Alita amply demonstrates that having a great action director like Robert Rodriguez is still important in the digital filmmaking age. You’d think – and I’ve certainly done this from time to time – that today’s blockbuster with all the technological expertise and money thrown at them basically couldn’t miss having at least solid action sequences, but then just look at the sad excuses for action featured in Venom or Shazam (to mention the worst offenders I’ve seen in the last year or so) and compare the staging, imagining and execution of their action scenes to the fast, imaginative and fun things Rodriguez does with the same sort of technology and budget. Apparently, having a visual imagination and an innate sense of pacing still is pretty useful when it comes to action scenes in the post-analogue era.

Three Films Make A Post: They Thought They Were Alone

Iron Man 2 (2010): No wonder mainstream critics looked less favourably on Jon Favreau's second Iron Man movie than they did on the first one. Instead of going in the direction of the serious and the dark (and we all know only the serious and the dark can be good, unless your making comedies about neurotic New Yorkers not featuring any explosions), Favreau goes on an all-out binge of the silly and the slightly to heavily ridiculous while trying to tell about half a dozen stories at once without including much of an actual plot holding them together. Not surprisingly, this leads to a highly distractible film that is lacking in coherence and dramatic power and prefers spending its time on play and having (often dumb) fun with whatever it can get its hands on.

Fortunately, I do like the silly and the ridiculous parts of superhero fiction as much as I do the more serious interpretations of the concept, and approve of a director spending ridiculous amounts of big company media money on playing around, so I had just about as much fun with the film as Favreau, Downey and the gang seem to have had.

Machete (2010): I know, as someone mostly specializing in cult movies, I am required by law to look down on the efforts of people like Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino mining everyone's favourite cult movies for fun, art and profit, and to mumble some stuff about "stealing" from "my genre" that has nothing whatsoever to do with my understanding of the way cultural products feed on other cultural products or - more specifically - the way classic exploitation movies themselves have been built from other people's ideas and the lust for money (which of course doesn't say anything about their qualities as art or entertainment).

Fortunately, I don't care about that law, and have enjoyed nearly anything Rodriguez (or Tarantino) has ever made. Machete is no exception to that rule. As in Favreau's movie, there's a lot of wallowing in silliness on screen here too, but also a whole bunch of silly/cool pretend violence, a bit of sledgehammer political satire, Steven Seagal actually moving and speaking his own lines (though he does both with the expected problems), mainstream Hollywood actresses not daring to undress, and Danny Trejo doing what Danny Trejo does best. It's all in good fun; most of the time, Machete is a lot of fun.

Spirited Killer 3 (or whatever it is actually called, though this might actually be the spiritual sequel to what usually goes under the name of Spirited Killer 2; 199x): Two groups of people (one Japanese, the other Chinese) are tromping through a well-known patch of Thai jungle in search of a black crane's egg. Alas, an evil shaman played by Panna Rittikrai (who else?), has called dibs on the egg and sets his undead servants (including two ninjas who just love to shout "Nin-nin-nin-nin-ja!") on them. Only when the Japanese, the Chinese and the Thai people of a nearby village unite and team-up with a girl with demonic blood (don't ask) can they hinder the bad guy from using the egg for world domination.

Unfortunately, what sounds like a perfectly awesome piece of weird fu cinema gets dragged down into that very particular brand of Thai slapstick humour that makes me want to bash my own head in when I have to witness it. Not even the ninja or a gut-munching old woman are enough to alleviate the pain of dozens of sped-up chase scenes and pratfalling. Of course, not everyone is as allergic to this sort of thing as I am, so you (yes, YOU!) might well like it.

 

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