Film Round-Up: Ghosted, Renfield and Hypnotic

BOOM MOVIES!

Ghosted

Chris Evans follows Ana de Armas to London after a very good date and finds out she’s a secret agent. This is an old fashioned caper in the vein of Romancing the Stone. This sort of film completely relies on the chemistry between the two leads. And you’d think that would be perfect for Evans and de Armas who have worked together before on the brilliant Knives Out. But here, there’s no spark. I’m not sure why, but you never really believe these two together like you do other couples in films of this type. And when there isn’t that chemistry there, it exposes that everything else is a pretty functional action movie with some poor special effects. It’s a real shame as I love this sort of movie, I have a soft spot for last year’s The Lost City, but this one never lights up like it should.

Renfield

Dracula’s assistant Renfield starts to realise his relationship with his boss is not healthy so starts to try and break free. I always marvel at the ways some people keep finding new ways to tell the Dracula story. Here, we have a comedic take with Nicholas Hoult as Renfield with the joke being that it’s a toxic romantic relationship between him and Nicholas Cage’s Dracula. Yes, that casting is as brilliant as you’d expect because he has as much fun as possible with it. What you get is a movie that is surprisingly bloody, yeah I know it’s Dracula but this film gets a bit mad with the gore, and the bizarre gang war Renfield accidentally gets involved with is pretty fun as well. This is a very daft movie and not one that I remember that well having took a bit of time to write this, but certainly you can have an enjoyable evening in with this film.

Hypnotic

Ben Affleck is determined to find his kidnapped daughter but must delve into the world of super powerful hypnotists to do so. For some bizarre reason, we are getting Inception rip-offs now more than ten years after it was released. And while Hugh Jack’s Reminiscence was mediocre, this is inexplicably terrible. It’s a confusing mess that fails at everything a movie can be. It’s storyline is baffling, taking a million twist and turns which only serve to make you dizzy and throw up. It’s pacing is manic, never realising that it’s the lulls that allow you to build the world and get people engaged in the frankly stupid story you’re telling. A story I tell you that has hypnotists that are so powerful they can simply order anyone they want about. Every twist makes the film more stupid, as if the movie is snorting glue everytime it needs to do something new in the plot. Then to cap it off, the film not only directly rips off the city folding in on itself effect from Inception, but does it so badly that you can’t imagine that this is the 2023 film and Christopher Nolan’s classic is from 2010. An atrocious movie on a level you don’t see anymore.