There’s also Sarah (Adria Arjona), a steely reality-TV survivor – she won a season of Hot Survivor Babes – who has designs on the host and her claws out for rivals. Since Frida has been looking at Slater with cartoon hearts for eyes since the opening scene, the two women are immediately embroiled in a catty sublimated power struggle.
If all this sounds awfully retrograde, Slater’s guy pals aren’t much better. They’re a backslapping bunch of beta males played by actors doing clever variations on sleaze: Simon Rex (the porn-star star of Red Rocket); smiling, cynical Christian Slater; Levon Hawke (Ethan’s son) as a callow tech-lord wannabe; and Haley Joel Osment, the former Sixth Sense star who has grown up to resemble the world’s most dissolute Ewok. They all understand the assignment – sybaritic good times with an undercurrent of menace – and convey it with brio.
Tatum, the director’s real-life partner, conveys a surprising sensitivity and shyness as the top dog, behind which we catch faint glints of something more calculating – it’s a subtly layered performance that deserves a better movie. By contrast, Geena Davis flails as Slater’s hapless sister/majordomo, an underwritten part that deserves no movie at all.
So what’s really going down on Slater King’s hideaway island? Blink Twice, which was originally titled Pussy Island until Kravitz, uh, blinked, plants clues, rumbles a few storm clouds, and sends Frida into forbidden cabins and cabinets to piece together … but I can say no more. Suffice to say that the revelations cast a damper on the good times and turn the sun-splashed party into an endless bummer.
Kravitz, who wrote the screenplay with E.T. Feigenbaum (TV’s High Fidelity), has things to say about men’s gaslighting and abuse of women and about how performative acts of contrition – Slater has publicly apologised for earlier bad behaviour – don’t mean much when you’re one of Earth’s richest humans. But the message in, say, Get Out was yoked to an airtight story structure, whereas Blink Twice becomes less believable as it goes.
The back end of Blink Twice is standard thriller territory, but it’s enlivened by the sudden camaraderie of Frida and Sarah, the smartest two people on the island as well as the most endangered. Ackie has a graceful, inquisitive presence, and her character has been written with interesting shades of insecurity and greed. It’s not her fault that Arjona, of TV’s Andor and Richard Linklater’s terrific Hit Man, has the kind of natural star charisma that blows away everyone else on-screen.
The director keeps it moving fast enough that you may not notice the yawning plot holes and improbabilities – I can’t specify without spoiling – until the drive home, at which point so many questions may have presented themselves that you have to pull over and count things up on your fingers. Blink Twice also requires some of its characters to lose more memories than seems physically or psychically possible, and there’s a final double twist that pushes the movie even farther out onto the ledge of implausibility.
In sum, the movie’s a passable time-waster, but it might be better – for Kravitz’s film-making future and for us – if we just forgot the whole thing.
Two stars. Rated R. At cinemas. Contains strong violent content, sexual assault, drug use, language throughout and some sexual references. 102 minutes.
Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars okay, one star poor, no stars waste of time.
