Rating: C-
Dir: Robert Rodriguez.
Star: Ben Affleck, Alice Braga, J. D. Pardo, William Fichtner.
I hadn’t realized this even existed. The last Rodriguez movie of which I was aware, was Alita: Battle Angel. He has actually made four features since, though this is the only one to come out in theatres. You may have blinked and missed it. Frankly, I’m not surprised, since this is a largely generic science-fiction thriller. At least, it is in the first half. You do get an interesting twist that helps revive interest. But this backfires, because it leaves you suspicious of everything that happens the rest of the way. When a movie yanks the carpet out from under you in this manner, it’s unsurprising if the audience has issues of trust thereafter.
Detective Danny Rourke (Affleck) had his young daughter, Minnie, abducted in front of his eyes. Three years later, he’s still in therapy, when he gets a tip about an imminent bank robbery. It happens, with perpetrator Lev Dellrayne (Fichtner) giving commands to guards, tellers and even Rourke’s colleagues, which are immediately obeyed. Rourke traces the tip to psychic Diana Cruz (Braga), who tells him about “hypnotics”. They are the product of a government program, and have the ability to make you believe any reality they want. Diana quit the program and went off the grid. Dellrayne was its most accomplished product. But Rourke is curiously resistant to their abilities, and there increasingly appears to be a connection to the disappearance of Minnie too.
It’s sometimes a bit of a slog. The script is quite chatty, with some large, difficult to digest lumps of exposition. The powers appear rather inconsistent, doing whatever is needed for the plot to move. The script plays like a Philip K. Dick story ordered off Temu, with the concept of “reality” being malleable and subject to manipulation by interested parties. When the twist shows up, these parallels become more pronounced. It does explain – or, at least, excuse – some of the clunkier conveniences to that point. Yet I was then reluctant to believe anything the film showed me, as it went deeper down the rabbit-hole, Inception-style. An unnecessary mid-credit sequence proves this scepticism to be well-founded, and diluted the point of the preceding ninety minutes.
When the movie isn’t Dick-ing around, you’ll notice elements of other, better SF films, like The Matrix and Inception. But while other Robert Rodriguez SF, such as The Faculty, has a quirky sense of doing its own thing, this is blandly generic, and would not have felt out of place on the SyFy channel in the mid-nineties. I honestly had forgotten he directed it, until the end credits rolled. I then promptly got distracted by the way Robert’s son is apparently called “Racer Max”. I think the concept is an ill fit for a film-maker like Rodriguez, who seems better suited to the “blunt instrument” school of cinema [and I don’t mean that, in any way, negatively]. Pseudo-smart rather than smart – probably fitting it was made in Austin.