If, like me, you’re a big fan of Channing Tatum and love seeing him show off his range as an actor, it’s been an awesome summer for you. Not everything he’s appeared in this year has necessarily been the biggest hit (although his hilarious cameo in the year’s most lucrative comic book film is a highlight), but both Fly Me to the Moon and Blink Twice see him doing unique work in very interesting films. Blink Twice, Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, is certainly the most challenging of the 2024 Tatum trifecta in terms of subject matter, but it’s just as much fun as the other two when taken on its own terms as a very dark and sometimes very darkly funny thriller.
Though this story has its fair share of plot holes, Kravitz, director of photography Adam Newport-Berra, and editor Kathryn J. Schubert tell it in such a way that it often papers over its own rough spots agreeably enough. Tech billionaire Slater King’s (Tatum) lavish island paradise is often displayed in long, sweeping, unbroken shots, and as suspicions rise among the five women he and his entourage have brought there for a “vacation,” nervousness reveals itself in well-timed quick, jittery cuts, keeping us engaged through every suspend-your-disbelief twist. Cocktail waitress Frida (Naomi Ackie) seems to have a crush on the tech mogul, and when she and her coworker and best friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) meet him at a gala, he finds Frida so beautiful and charming that he whisks them away on this too-good-to-be-true adventure. Only later do Frida and Jess realize that the other women they meet there weren’t already part of Slater’s inner circle like they had assumed.
That inner circle is populated with a plethora of well-known actors, some of whom are given much more to do than others. These characters, played by Geena Davis, Christian Slater, Haley Joel Osment, Kyle MacLachlan, Simon Rex, and Levon Hawke respectively, seem just quirky enough to give an air of buoyancy and fun to the proceedings. However, Jess is especially freaked out by a few strange occurrences early on. Frida spends much of the first act dazzled by Slater’s impeccably suave demeanor and the general beauty of the island. She’s also preoccupied with the jealous glances of Sarah (Adria Arjona), who seems annoyed at how much time of day Slater gives Frida. There’s a reason Frida and Sarah are linked early on from a storytelling perspective, and thematically, their dynamic is one of the many levels on which Blink Twice succeeds.
Where the film is less successful is in its delivery of plot mechanics. The third act and finale are nobly no-holds-barred; both are painfully sharp commentaries on how the rich use everyone else. The storytelling just gets a little cumbersome in terms of how co-screenwriters Kravitz and E.T. Feigenbaum want us to arrive there. Still, the final sequences give Ackie and Tatum some brilliant material to work with, and both actors knock these moments out of the park. Kravitz and crew are exploring the utility and possible futility of accountability and cancelling in a world where we all know how bad and how powerful the bad guys really are. This is an incredibly heightened situation, to be sure, but when built from the chauvinist motivations of the film’s villains, it comes across as something rooted in a legitimate fear.
While flawed, Blink Twice is a rare mix of thoughtfulness and flip-the-script thriller fun. Consider yourself warned, though: while this film does present a narrative of empowerment, it absolutely does not shy away from the horrors of the exploitation it explores. | George Napper
