Film Review - Blink Twice (2024)

Blink Twice is Zoe Kravitz’s directorial debut from a script written by Her and E.T. Feigenbaum and stars Channing Tatum as Slater King, a young Tech Billionaire who meets a struggling waitress (Naomi Ackie) at a party one night and invites her to his island retreat for a getaway but island fun and games can sometimes not be what they seem.

Zoe Kravitz shows a lot of promise as a director with this movie, I particularly liked the way she used close up shots where it feels like when those moments come on screen the characters in the movie are looking directly at you without looking directly through the camera lens and breaking the fourth wall, she also does some interesting framing choices which make good use of the 2.35:1 aspect ratio which sometimes isn’t used as well as it could be.

But where this movie fell flat for me is in it’s screenplay and primarily it’s because it just hits the same beats so many movies have hit on in the last 5 to 10 years:

- How Society views Women (Check)
- The tech bro (Check)
- The isolated getaway where fun and games happen (Check)
- The commentary on how terrible the ultra-rich are (Check)
- Various twists and turns (Check)
- And finally the big reveal that shows everything in context (Check)

And all of it has for me gotten very tiresome, now this isn’t to say I don’t respond to any of these themes in other movies because I certainly have such as Knives Out 1, Promising Young Women and the Menu and all of those films did these points to various degrees so much better than this movie and in far more entertaining ways whether it be through clever storytelling, a deliciously dark tone or with a colourful villain and all of those I felt were missing here.

Performance wise the film is okay, Ackie is a good young actress (and one of the very few bright spots of the Rise of Skywalker) and she does perfectly well here, Hayley Joel Osment is fine as well in a small role as are Levon Hawke and Simon Rex, Kyle McLachlan, Geena Davis and Christian Slater are okay but didn’t really do all that much in the film while Alia Shawkat, Liz Caribel, Trew Mullen and Adria Arjona were good as well.

As for Tatum well I sometimes find him very bland to watch and here is no exception and what doesn’t help is that I saw this movie and performance after watching Josh Hartnett in Trap a couple of weeks back and he did a much better job at playing the friendly guy with evil bubbling under the surface much more memorably than Tatum does here as it felt like at times he struggles with this.

And so that was Blink Twice and it did very little for me, Kravitz will make a good director one day but hopefully she takes on someone else’s script instead of her own as here she just hits the same beats other movies did much better and I’m getting a little sick of it but that’s only me, 2 out of 5.