There are few things that fill me with more delight than seeing the words “Directed by Robert Rodriguez” in big fuck-off letters on a cinema screen. I’ve gotten to the point where I would willingly watch the guy work on just about anything, but there’s something special about seeing his work on the big screen. The human lab rat turned one-man film crew who lives and breathes neo-exploitation and old-school pulp cinema, he’s the guy that marked the real turning point for my fascination with filmmaking as a creative process, and auteur theory in particular. And with his latest, a detective-led crime drama that spirals out into a government conspiracy involving psychics and the power of hypnotic suggestion, there’s quite a bit of other auteurs to be found in the construction here.
Its psychological bent has some of Hitchcock’s fingerprints on it, and the focus on deception and layered realities echoes a hefty chunk of Christopher Nolan’s filmography. And to be honest, I can’t say this handles those aspects as well as those other directors. Rodriguez has been sitting on this script for about two decades and the age definitely shows, even without getting into how familiar it turns out on-screen.
But even with that said, it’s still recognisably his project. It’s still delivered with that uncanny conviction, that sensation that the director isn’t half-arsing it (a feature that crops up even in films he made under contractual obligation like Spy Kids: All The Time In The World), and there’s a lot of the Tex-Mex culture clash aesthetic that populates most of his work thus far. Even the obvious influences feel less like they’re just direct lifts (save for the attempts to recreate Inception’s world-folding visuals to glaringly lesser effect), and more that they’re being filtered through his own way of doing things.
That comes through most strongly with the film this most resembles: RR’s own Red 11. It’s a film I didn’t get around to reviewing because it didn’t get an official release here in Australia, but the way it dealt with mindfuckery and making the characters (and the audience in turn) question reality as they seemingly know it hits a lot of similar notes. It also accounts for how said mindfuckery and the notion of mental constructs align with Inception’s metacommentary on the process of filmmaking, which Red 11 was quite literal about in a lot of ways.
This isn’t quite as literal, since it doesn’t involve an entire side character whose sole purpose is to create in-universe soundtracks for the in-universe action and drama going on (Red 11 is good but it’s a weird-ass movie), but it ends up being much more direct about that subtext. As the mystery grows ever more convoluted and twisty (and as someone who cut their teeth on Ocean’s Eleven, Death Note, and Saw, I’m not saying that as a negative), the way it deals with the Hypnotics, their role in this world, and other instances of how social and media persuasion shape our reality, was something I found quite compelling.
I once again admit to being a sucker for these kinds of metafiction exercises, as well as films that deal with memory as an aspect of human existence, but there’s just something that appeals to me about this film’s underlying notion of how those with the gift of creating realities like this shouldn’t be beholden to suits who only wish to satisfy their ends. Coming from an independent production, with a lot of the film craft being handled either by Rodriguez himself or his kids (for a story that ultimately emphasises the importance of family, no less), makes that point hit that much harder.
I’m not expecting a lot of others to be as into this as I am. There’s a lot here that will likely underwhelm those who can spot where the borrowed parts are sourced from, along with how exposition-heavy Rodriguez and MonsterVerse scribe Max Borenstein’s script can get. But personally, this hits a lot of my sweet spots, not the least of which because it continues to highlight the idiosyncrasies that make Robert Rodriguez one of my favourite filmmakers to this day. It’s messy, it’s earnest, it feels like a relic of the time when direct-to-video features were still made on video tapes; it’s an RR joint, and the delight still hasn’t worn off yet.
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