Blink Twice: A Review

BLINK TWICE

Channing Tatum is a curious figure to me. I do not think he can act. While I thought he was fine in 21 Jump Street and This is the End, that seemed to be more him spoofing himself than any actual acting. Apart from his ability to take his clothes off, I have never seen anything film-wise that suggest to me that Tatum should be in film. Blink Twice, directed and cowritten by his current girlfriend Zoe Kravitz, does not change my mind on him.

Frida (Naomi Ackie) is impressed to obsessed with tech billionaire Slater King (Tatum). Slater has had an unspecified scandal that forced him to step back from his public profile and is now working to rehabilitate and heal both his public image and presumably his emotional well-being. Frida and her BFF Jess (Alia Shawkat) are waitresses at the swanky soiree fundraiser King is hosting. They slip off their uniforms and slip into evening dress, where they instantly crash the party. A broken high heel causes Frida to crash onto the floor, but it is enough for Slater to find her and soon be besotted by her.

Without any hesitation, Frida and Jess fly off with Slater and a group of his friends to Slater's private island. Going on this jaunt are apparent besties Camilla and Heather (Liz Caribel and Trew Mullen). Another woman, reality television star Sarah (Adria Arjona) is also on the island. The men, whom Frida and Jess met at the fundraiser, are flying with them as well. There is celebrity chef Cody (Simon Rex), Slater's business associate Vic (Christian Slater), crypto wunderkind Lucas (Levon Hawke) and Tom (Haley Joel Osment), who I think is an actor going through a career slump. 

At first, everything is fine on this fantasy island of hedonism with rampant boozing and drugging but remarkably few hookups. Why is that? What is Slater's assistant Stacy (Geena Davis) really up to? Why does a creepy old woman call Frida "Red Rabbit" (which I initially misheard as "red robin")? After Jess gets bitten by a snake, she starts freaking out and pleading to leave. Frida, however, won't go. Frida then becomes alarmed when Jess disappears, yet no one has any memory of Jess at all. 

More strangeness occurs when first Frida and later Sarah start remembering things and seeing flashes of terrible things. They eventually realize the truth. Far from this being some delightful sojourn into decadence, the women have been held prisoner on the island. The men have been drugging and raping them repeatedly, save for Lucas who apparently is too weak-willed to participate or report it. Now it is up to Frida and Sarah to free themselves from this nightmare. If it means taking bloody revenge, so be it. Their fight culminates in a torrent of bloodshed and a triumph for our former waitress.

For better or worse, I am a critic who gets hung up on details. Kravitz and her cowriter E.T. Fiegenbaum appears to have essentially blended Promising Young Woman and Don't Worry Darling in another tale of female empowerment that falls apart when you think on it. Why, for example, would Slater and his male chauvinist pig friends abduct and rape the same women they did last year? I might give some leeway had Blink Twice opted to have Frida discover that this was some kind of annual event and this year they were the sacrificial victims. However, as one of the film's twists is that these men had raped Frida on an unremembered previous visit, why would they target the same women again? 

As a side note, I kept calling the film "Don't Blink" as opposed to Blink Twice. I do not know why. Maybe it was my subconscious reminding me about Get Out and Us, which Blink Twice also seems to draw from. 

Moreover, "abduct" or take prisoner or hold hostage is a stretch given that they went to the island on their own free will. I could grant that perhaps it was not on their own free will if the chemicals they were plied with made them forget enough. However, Blink Twice opens with Frida scrolling through her cellphone about Slater King. As presented in the film, she is the one obsessed with him. Did the drugs make her do that? If so, why then did Sarah initially appear to be jealous of Frida and make her the rival for Slater's attention?

I could not get over how Frida and Jess simply up and left whatever jobs they had to fly off to a private island with someone they did not know. I would advise against flying off to remote locales with anyone whom you do not know, no matter how famous he/she is. It is extremely dangerous and irresponsible to travel with strangers. This in no way justifies what the women went through. It does, however, make one question why they would take that kind of risk.

Had, for example, Blink Twice opted to have them win some contest to lure them to this forbidden paradise, then we might have had something. However, the logical leaps one has to go through to justify the plot are too much for me.

Blink Twice also has some truly awful lines and situations that should be groan-inducing. Early on, Frida advises her BFF when it comes to Jess' boyfriend to "Stop giving away your power!". I find such statements unrealistic. That sounds so heavy-handed. Later on, Sarah and Frida talk about how women have been taught to compete against each other when they should work together. Again, do people, actual people, talk like this? Would someone like Sarah, who had starred on Hot Survivor Babes for 22 years, be so easily taken by Slater King and his satanic court? The whole concept of Hot Survivor Babes, the faux-reality show Sarah learned her survivalist skills on, strikes me as misandrist. Men, true, are visual when it comes to beautiful women. However, men are not uniformly shallow as to watch nothing but girls in skimpy outfits just to see girls in skimpy outfits. 

Blink Twice makes the case that all these men would either actively participate in mass rapes and later on, killings, or at least stay silent like Lucas did. That too is shockingly misandrist and like Promising Young Woman and Don't Worry Darling, pushes a narrative that all men are dangerous who see women as nothing. What does it say about the state of the world that there is such hatred for a group of people based on their gender? 

Kravitz, as a director, loves close-ups. It is not as distracting as it could have been, but I think we could have done away with so many. She could not get her current boyfriend Channing Tatum to act. To be fair, no one has managed to do that, so I cut her some slack. She, however, could not get anyone to act. Naomi Ackie was not compelling as Frida. She is meant to be the naive innocent caught up in this web of sex games. However, she was thoroughly blank for most of the film. 

Everyone else really is forgettable, though I felt a bit sad for Osment who appeared to have to endure fat jokes at his expense. During one flashback, he tells the others off about his lack of participation by munching on a candy bar and snapping, "Shut up, I'm eating!". Other times he is made to mention how he is not partaking in Cody's lavish meals due to eating nothing but eggs. I don't get the humor in that.

Blink Twice is treading on too familiar territory (Promising Young Woman, Don't Worry Darling, Get Out, a dash of Saltburn). The rich and powerful may be degenerate, but those they lure should exercise some caution. 

  

DECISION: D-