Hypnotic

Robert Rodriguez is an immensely gifted cinematographer and has quite a vivid imagination, and both of these great qualities are abundant in Hypnotic. It has a wonderfully clever concept that keeps the film watchable and subversive twists that keep the experience unique.

Sadly, what keeps this movie from being powerful and memorable is it's excessive reliance on exposition. So much of it is necessary to explain the overly complex plot and possibly over half of the dialogue is clumsily-written rapid-fire exposition. It just isn't fun.

And the script keeps us from forming any sort of emotional connection with this story because it's so concerned with explaining WHAT is happening that it forgets to let us in on the intimacies of WHY it's all happening-who these people are, really, and why we should care.

I find this to be a very frustrating film, because it had so much more potential than was tapped into by this extremely rough screenplay.