Robert Rodriguez works with his family: their film at the Cannes Film Festival, screened in Séance de Minuit

Robert Rodriguez is at the Cannes Film Festival to present the thriller Hypnotic in Séance de Minuit.

The project then relies essentially on its starry cast, with Ben Affleck at the top of the bill. Ben Affleck is not present in Cannes to present « Hypnotic », he will miss during the ultimate midnight red carpet, we can say the same about his character on the screen.

He knows how to be an atypical voice in American cinema, with his fierce independence and his incorrigible need to shoot at home, in his Texas studio. But HYPNOTIC is devoid of any personality, any flamboyance. From the pitch (Ben Affleck, – a cop), whose daughter was kidnapped, finds his trace on the occasion of a robbery perpetrated by an ace of hypnosis (William Fichtner) – until the result, clean but never surprising, HYPNOTIC is in line with this commercial cinema of the early 2000s made on the chain. In the United States, the film was a resounding failure.

Danny Rourke is a policeman searching for his missing daughter and dating a dodgy therapist who curiously taps her notebook with her pen. You don’t need more to know that something is wrong, especially when it comes to probing this man’s too random reactions.

Without a big mark of science fiction behind it, without any public pre-science, HYPNOTIC, a thriller for an adult audience, tries to impose its universe on the cinema, a universe of pretense and superpowers of hypnosis .

Robert Rodriguez works as a family with his son Rebel Rodriguez, whom he signs the film’s soundtrack.

The characters are sorely lacking in personality and the plot is confused, we fold all the cards and the characters of William Fichtner and Alice Braga no longer release anything ambitious or frightening.

The step was probably too high for this film which loses its balance, the mystery can play in its favor, but the pace continues to accelerate. A bank robbery and a succession of escape scenes, the events follow one another without downtime, without intensity, without any spatialization logic either.

Its presence in the Séance de Minuit at the Cannes Film Festival raises questions, but its release in French cinemas is strangely pleasing.

Synopsis: A detective investigating a series of major robberies finds himself embroiled in a case involving his missing daughter and a secret government program.

Copyright ©2023 IMPACT EUROPEAN

Copyright ©2023 IMPACT EUROPEAN

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Gabriel MIHAI

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