Starring Ben Affleck, the thriller Hypnotic slipped into cinemas in 2023. But its heist sequence really has to be seen to be believed…
At their best, heist scenes are pure cinema: a collision of suspense, intrigue, character and satisfying pay-off. There’s the anticipation of the planning; the nail-biting tension of the act itself. Will one of the thieves make a mistake? Will a bank clerk press one of those red buttons underneath a desk? Will the whole operation end in success or bullet-strewn failure?
The heist is such an effective plot device that entire stories can be built around it. Much of the Ocean’s films are about the plotting and mathematical precision that goes into, say, breaking into a Las Vegas vault. Christopher Nolan’s Inception – essentially a mind heist – spends much of its duration exploring how Leonardo DiCaprio’s protagonist assembles a team capable of messing with Cillian Murphy’s head.
Hypnotic, the 2023 thriller directed and co-written by Robert Rodriguez, has a Nolan-esque central character in it: the taciturn, somewhat solitary Detective Danny Rourke, played by Ben Affleck. Like so many Nolan heroes, Rourke is weighed down by the ghosts of his past: three years earlier, his daughter vanished from a busy park; the abductor was caught, but the girl was never found.
Returning to work after several therapy sessions, Rourke learns from his partner Nicks (JD Pardo) that thieves have been breaking into banks and stealing a single safe deposit box from each. No other cash or valuables – just one, seemingly random box from the vault. An anonymous caller has tipped off the police that another robbery is about to take place – and so Rourke and Nicks race to the scene.
We then come to the point of this piece: Hypnotic then stages what might be one of the weirdest heist sequences ever committed to film.
From the inside of a van bristling with surveillance equipment, Rourke and his team stake out the bank, waiting for the villains to emerge. But in place of a car full of robbers wielding shotguns, along comes a lone guy in a black suit, who sets himself down on a public bench.
This is Dellrayne, played with lizard-like steeliness by William Fichtner.
On a grainy video feed, Rourke watches as Dellrayne strikes up a conversation with a blonde woman who sits down next to him; he asks her for a lighter, and she hands one over. “It’s quite masculine,” Dellrayne says. “Is it yours?”
The woman replies that her husband gave it to her, even though she doesn’t smoke. “He’s got you under his spell, doesn’t he,” Dellrayne purrs, portentously.
It’s the first hint that Dellrayne isn’t your usual smooth criminal. With a single utterance (such as, “It’s very hot today…”) he’s capable of seizing control of unsuspecting minds, whether it’s the woman who sat next to him on the bench or a couple of security guards he mutters to a minute later.
Suspecting something’s amiss, Rourke heads into the bank, ignoring pleas from his colleagues to stay put. As Rourke talks his way into the vault full of deposit boxes, the music builds in volume. Outside, the woman from the park bench is clacking around in her heels, muttering to herself about the heat and stripping off her clothes.
Then, chaos erupts: wandering into the path of a bus, the woman causes an almighty pile-up that sees bonnets crumple and bodies fly through windscreens.
Back inside the bank, Dellrayne has assembled a trio of hypnotised drones – the two security guys from outside and a clerk – and uses them to essentially raid the deposit boxes on his behalf.
For all his scowling and gruff commands, Rourke is unable to stop the robbery from taking place, and the whole batty, bravura sequence ends with more crashes and an almighty explosion. Dellrayne smiles wickedly and disappears from the bank’s rooftop. Rourke is left baffled, surrounded by bodies, his cleft chin vibrating.
Downstairs, the woman from the bench, stripped down to her bra, cavorts beneath the shower of a broken fire hydrant.
Lasting a shade under 10 minutes, it’s a remarkable scene, both in the grim-faced seriousness with which it’s staged and the what-the-hell-just-happened wildness of its turns. It’s unclear whether Rodriguez intended the scene to be funny, but it certainly appears as though he wants to play with audience expectations. It’s a heist, Jim, but not as we know it.
The rest of Hypnotic is similarly twisty. Rourke is in constant pursuit of Dellrayne, whom he suspects has something to do with his daughter’s disappearance. But the villain’s Jedi mind trick powers means he’s always one step ahead, even when Rourke secures the help of Alice Braga’s clairvoyant, Diana, who knows a great deal about Dellrayne’s past and his supernatural powers.
It’d be easy to list all the other thrillers and genre writers Hypnotic owes a debt to, but doing that would spoil Rodriguez’s assorted twists. Hypnotic is so much like its influences, though, that it feels like a Zucker parody of a typical Hollywood high-concept thriller. You may remember director Spike Jonze’s 2002 comedy Adaptation, where Nicolas Cage plays a fictionalised version of the film’s own screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, as well as his (entirely made-up) brother, Donald.
Illustrating the age-old clash between art and commerce, Charlie sweats over his typewriter, trying to adapt a non-fiction book into a film script that has some shred of creative merit. The bumptious Donald, meanwhile, bashes out a cliche-ridden psychological thriller script called The Three. Charlie mercilessly picks logical holes in it, but the joke’s on him: Donald sells his script for over a million dollars.
All of which is to say that Hypnotic feels like someone bought a Donald Kaufman script and managed to get Ben Affleck to star in it. Neither critics nor audiences seemed impressed by it in 2023; its take in cinemas was about $16m against a moderately high budget of $65m, and reviewers wheeled out descriptors like ‘clunky’, ‘dozy’ and ‘sloppy’ and other words that sound like characters cut out of Snow White.
Viewed with low expectations, though, and Hypnotic has a certain charm to it. Rodriguez – better known for more action-packed fare like Desperado and From Dusk Till Dawn – can’t resist throwing the odd jab of outrageousness into his talky thriller, like a leather-clad motorcyclist careening face-first into a shop display.
Affleck seems oblivious to how silly everything’s getting, even as he shakes his head and sighs as a random guy rams his own head into a spike. Fichtner, on the other hand, definitely detects which way the tonal wind’s blowing, and plays Dellrayne with a streak of wry playfulness beneath the menace. A villain capable of controlling minds and warping reality, he’s also the master of chess metaphors. Goading Rourke over the loss of his daughter and the goon accused of her abduction, Dellrayne says, “That was his name, wasn’t it? The pawn who took your… queen?”
Somehow, Fichtner keeps a straight face.
Then again, everybody does – whether it’s Affleck looking around shiftily as Braga asks, “Excuse me, sir, which way’s Mexico?” or actor Bonnie Discepolo, who plays the cigarette lighter-owning woman who literally stops traffic.
Hypnotic isn’t a great movie, but it’s an entertaining one – and its clattering heist sequence is a mesmerising standout.
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