Imagine a studio paying so much money for a screenplay that it literally bankrupted them. That’s what happened when Solstice Studios acquired Robert Rodriguez’s Hypnotic, which, on paper, does sound quite interesting: the film chronicles a police detective’s (Ben Affleck) quest to find Lev Dellrayne (William Fichtner), the person who kidnapped his daughter. Dellrayne is hypnotic, meaning he can easily manipulate someone’s mind and perception of reality by uttering a few words to someone.

Detective Rourke (Affleck) teams up with Diana Cruz (Alice Braga), a powerful hypnotic, to take town Dellrayne, but things are quickly not as they seem… Again, that sounds like an interesting premise, and it is seemingly very much a riff on Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Inception, and Tenet (perhaps in 2010, it would’ve been a box office juggernaut), but its execution is amazingly sloppy and barely watchable.

Rodriguez has always been known for making movies through a cheap and no-nonsense style, and it has worked to great effect in his El Mariachi trilogy and even in the Spy Kids flicks. Hell, The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl is a guilty pleasure for many, even if its screenplay is one of the worst ever written, and the CGI is an absolute nightmare to watch. Rodriguez has also proven himself to direct massive blockbusters like Alita: Battle Angel and episodes of The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. He is an incredibly versatile filmmaker, but his filmography has been mostly inconsistent.

You’d think that a scenario like Hypnotic would mean success for Rodriguez as he gives his own spin on Nolan’s trippiest movies, but he cannot save this film from being anything more than a disaster. There isn’t a single actor that gives a good performance here. Affleck looks particularly bored trying to assimilate every ounce of exposition Braga and Fichtner consistently deliver. None of the characters feel like they are human or live in a human world with extraordinary circumstances. The dialogue is mostly flat and unengaging, with Braga’s character being the worst offender of them all.

I cannot for the life of me explain to you all what a “Hypnotic” truly is because the film keeps adding more information to the concept without necessarily explaining how that’s important. Such an expository-heavy movie needs more time to make the audience understand exactly what’s going on, but it continuously jumps the shark whenever it gets quasi-interesting and has “fun” blurring the line between reality and fiction. Is what you’re seeing even real? Is it a construct of Rourke’s imagination? Is Dellrayne an actual character? Who knows, and who cares!

The film gives the audience little motivation or interest to care about what’s happening because it overexplains the concept of hypnotics to the point where no one truly understands their purpose and underexplains everything else. Of course, it’s fine for a movie to be ambiguous and suspend certain elements. But for the movie to do that, its narrative must be tight, and its thematic elements must be strong. Hypnotic doesn’t have any of that.

It also doesn’t help that none of the action scenes are remotely engaging. They’re shot with the energy of an Asylum flick and edited in the vein of an Olivier Megaton picture. You cannot see a damn thing, but what you actively see are the actors sleepwalking through the setpieces. There’s no engagement from any of the stars — they perform in those sequences as if they were handcuffed and desperately want to leave.

But the worst part of the film is its midpoint twist, which changes everything that came before and is ridiculously uninspired. It feels like a total cop-out. I won’t spoil what it is, and you’re better off discovering it on your own, but it is amazingly lazy and insults the audience’s patience and intelligence. It also thinks it’s smart to add in so many twists and turns to subvert audience expectations after its “core” twist, but they all fall flat and deliver absolutely nothing of note for the viewer.

There’s no fun to be had watching Hypnotic. Even Rodriguez’s worst films have a campy quality to them that makes them watchable. Hypnotic isn’t unintentionally hilarious, nor campy enough for me to have cared. It’s not worth anyone’s time, and it certainly wasn’t worth bankrupting an emerging studio for having paid way too much money for such a mediocre script…

ZERO STARS

There are times when we see a documentary and it forces us to think about subject matter that we might not have given thought to otherwise. Watching a documentary is never easy because it takes you on a journey that might trigger a lot of people. That’s what documentarian Daniel Roher did with his recent project, titled ‘Navalny’. Almost everyone knows who Alexei Navalny is, what he did, and why the Russian government fear him. But only a fraction of the population knows about the struggles he went through to make people realize how Vladimir Putin has been poisoning the minds of millions of Russians and running a government that is full of corrupt people.

Navalny is considered to be an influential figure in Russia and his story is nothing short of an edge-of-the-seat thriller. In the documentary, filmmaker Daniel Roher takes a journalistic approach and follows Navalny’s every move. However, the documentary primarily focuses on the events surrounding his poisoning in Tomsk, Siberia, in August 2020, and the subsequent investigation. It was a miracle that the Russian revolutionary survived and went ahead with the investigation. The extraordinary footage provided by Roher makes this documentary an enthralling watch and there are moments when viewers will be on the edge of their seats to see what happens next. From the footage of the poisoning and investigation to lengthy interviews with Navalny and his loved ones, this documentary will give viewers all the details of why Navalny became such an influential person in Russia and across the globe.

Through the documentary, Navalny comes across as a force to be reckoned with and a person who never shies away from putting on a show for his followers and his nemesis. But he is acutely aware of the constant shadow of death that looms over him. This is what makes him so relatable. If you ever take on a powerful person, you know he or she has all the resources of taking you down at any point in time. Navalny never thought of such consequences and moved forward with his strategies so that he could expose what Putin and his government is doing in Russia.

Despite being a documentary, ‘Navalny’ has all the hallmarks of being a spy novel and keeps the audiences hooked from beginning to end. One particular scene with Navalny talking to one of the men who poisoned him on a phone call is undoubtedly one of the most jaw-dropping moments in the history of cinema. These moments make viewers feel like they are watching a spy thriller and not a documentary. To be honest, this movie is more than just a documentary, it is a testament to what people have the go through while battling corrupt people.

But one thing that this documentary does so well is that it shows how people around him were also at significant risk. His wife, Yulia, played a significant role in pushing Navalny forward and provides much-needed human moments Roher gets up close and personal with Navalny, who doesn’t shy away from answering tough questions, including ones about his past associations with the far-right in Russia.

It is one of the rare documentaries that are highly engaging and draws the audience into the drama through its skillful editing and pacing. From the very first frame, it is evident that ‘Navalny’ wants to reach a wider audience and comes forward with moments that are both emotional and thought-provoking.

The Russian revolutionary doesn’t want the public to stop if he gets assassinated or dies in prison and that’s why he categorically made it clear that this film should not act as a tribute to the work he has done in his life.

The documentary is a unique tale of one of the most brazen incidents of state-sponsored assassination in memory, making it a must-see film for any who is interested in knowing about a man fighting against his country.

There have been several major basketball pictures this year, with Ben Affleck’s Air and Calmatic’s White Men Can’t Jump remake being considerable successes. This week, it’s Universal’s turn with Shooting Stars, based on the 2009 memoir of the same name written by LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger. The film chronicles the life of a young LeBron (Mookie Cook) as he plays in the St.Vincent-St.Mary High School basketball team with his friends Dru Joyce III (Caleb McLaughlin), Sian Cotton (Khalil Everage), Romeo Travis (Scoot Henderson) and Illya McGee (Algee Smith).

The film’s basketball scenes are shot with great verve by cinematographer Karsten Gopinath. Drones have been part of our collective imagination since Michael Bay showed the world how great of a filmmaking tool it can be with Ambulance, and here, Gopinath and director Chris Robinson use it to terrific effect. The film cuts to an overhead drone shot of a building slowly panning to LeBron during one of its opening scenes, and there’s an even more impressive shot of a drone going into a net, spiraling backward as if it were a basketball.

Stuff like this is so cool to watch, but it seems like Gopinath and Robinson use every trick in their arsenal during the film’s opening hour and starts to fizzle out afterward. The movie then becomes a highly conventional basketball picture with less interesting stakes and style than what came before. When Shooting Stars pushes the stylistic envelope, it’s a marvel to look at. But when it starts to morph into something terribly conventional and formulaic, it’s a massive bore.

Barring two great supporting performances, none of the leads are memorable in any way. Cook does his best as LeBron but can’t match the charm the real LeBron has had on the court and in film. The same can be said for every other lead: their performances are lethargic, and they feel devoid of any legitimate charm or kinship that would solidify a movie like this and make it memorable. Some of the scenes where they bond together on the court are well made (because of their impressive visual kinetics), but they seem to come few and far between.

Shooting Stars [credit: Universal Pictures]

Most of the character arcs and relationships feel underdeveloped since the movie focuses most of its time on the basketball scenes. And as impressive as they are from a purely visual standpoint, they’re not so impressive from a storytelling standpoint. The basketball scenes don’t necessarily develop the characters and don’t draw interesting stakes for the audiences to become invested in the film.

Thankfully, Wood Harris and Dermot Mulroney are excellent as coaches Dru Joyce II and Keith Dambrot, respectively. Harris is the film’s emotional core and the main reason why anyone would want to seek it out. His dramatic presence is unparalleled and delivers monologues of terrific profundity. It’s a shame that the leads can’t match, or at least can’t feel as tangible as Harris in this film and in most of the performances he gives.

 

Ultimately, Shooting Stars doesn’t hit a slam dunk. The film’s underdeveloped core of main characters, paper-thin plot, and formulaic structure doesn’t help it, even if the basketball scenes and two strong performances help it become quasi-engaging. But it’s not enough for me to recommend you seek it out, even if you’re a massive LeBron fan. You’re better off reading the book it’s based on instead of watching a biopic where you’ll learn nothing of value from LeBron or the “fab four” that shaped him.

 

Shooting Stars is now streaming on Peacock.