The most fascinating leading men in Hollywood history understand the value of disturbing the goodness of their charismatic reputation. Tyrone Power was a trusted romantic lead, but he played the smug murderer in Billy Wilder’s 1957 film Witness for the Prosecution. In 1959, bruised and bruising Burt Lancaster embraced the part of a sordid newspaper columnist in the pitch-black noir he produced, Sweet Smell of Success. In 1963, a tender Paul Newman strutted through Hud as a pompous son with a cutting smile and depthless gaze. Denzel Washington was gruesomely low down in the dirt as a cop willing to wield his privilege against vulnerable Black and brown communities in 2001’s admittedly loathsome Training Day.  I am especially enamored with how Cary Grant brought a chill to his persona in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious and Suspicion — where all the charm and grace he’d displayed elsewhere came across simultaneously as crucial armor and a hidden weapon. These turns take not only an actor capable and willing to disrupt their own carefully crafted image but a script with vision and a director with ferocious style and who understands the stories a star’s body tells.
Going into Blink Twice — previously and more richly titled Pussy Island — I was curious about star Channing Tatum’s heel turn. Here was Hollywood’s favorite affable himbo choosing to play a dangerous billionaire tech bro capable of entrapping young women, thus flipping his image as a sweet-natured golden retriever of a man, bolstered and refined by the Magic Mike films that positioned him as keenly interested in female pleasure. When it came to the actor turned writer-director (turned Tatum’s romantic partner in the process) Zoë Kravitz, I had enjoyed her as a red-carpet fixture with sharp cheekbones and a vibe so chill she reads as disaffected. After she put her own spin on a slinky Catwoman in The Batman (2022) and played the agoraphobe in Steven Soderbergh’s thrilling Kimi (2022), I started to be intrigued by her potential as a storyteller, too, who could do more than produce an alluring but thinly drawn vibe. But when I heard she’d be directing Blink Twice (co-written by Kravitz and E.T. Feigenbaum), an immediate question came to mind: Can a woman like her — who has been ensconced in a wealth and visibility most Black girls will never experience thanks to her ultracool parents, actress Lisa Bonet and musician Lenny Kravitz — meaningfully critique the intersections of wealth, misogyny, and control that its eat-the-rich premise promised?
Unfortunately, Kravitz has neither the vision nor the range to deftly skewer the heinous foibles of wealthy men, let alone disrupt Tatum’s onscreen reputation. Blink Twice is a frustratingly timid take on the billionaire class, too busy swooning over Tatum’s figure to even realize it’s making that mistake. Or that it’s neglecting its own lead, Frida, played with gullible, wide-eyed appreciation by Naomi Ackie. She’s introduced sitting on the toilet in the bathroom of her shitty apartment, getting ready to head to her shitty job helping cater a swanky gala set to be attended by Tatum’s character, improbably named Slater King. Ahead of the event, Frida furiously scrolls the internet, eyes hungry for more information about Slater. She happens upon a recent video of him in conversation with a Black woman journalist, explaining that he has stepped down from his powerful company and bought an island. He’s apologizing for an indiscretion the film itself never explains; we can only assume it’s some act of sexual impropriety or targeted misogyny. So why is this broke, working-class and otherwise poorly defined Black woman abandoning all self-preservation and common sense to pursue him?
I still don’t know. At the gala, Frida and her best friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) ditch their catering uniforms for shimmering dresses and attempt to blend in with the moneyed masses around Slater and get closer to him. Frida proves clumsy. Champagne spills, glass is broken. Meanwhile, Slater is unlike any billionaire I’ve ever witnessed — not only because he looks like that, but because he possesses an uncharacteristic kindness. The camera is often placed below him, the light above him made into a halo, under which his smile is warm and his hands are outstretched. Of course, Frida takes them. It’s a shot — from its framing to its dress to the sculptural shifts of the actor’s body — that is befitting a Prince Charming. And this is repeated throughout the movie at crucial points. It’s a meet-cute out of a romantic comedy. If you squint and cock your head, you can see the possibilities that Kravitz forgoes in favor of this tepid approach. The layers of the film unpeel to reveal a (half-hearted) critique of how wealthy men wield their power crossed with a (Black) girlboss revenge story.  Too bad this one is stuck at the pitch of “go girl, give us nothing†that would feel dated even if it came out in the heyday of similar works from the late 2010s and very early 2020s — vibrantly shot, hollow-headed works like Emerald Fennell’s 2020 Promising Young Woman, to which it unfortunately feels akin.
For a second, I thought Kravitz would tie Frida’s obsession with Slater’s beauty and wealth to an analysis of the soft-life, quiet-wealth trends that sweep Black women into thinking that the architects of their misfortune (a.k.a. men) will save them from the grind of our economic system. It’s the Black community’s very own tradwife-adjacent trend, but with sharper glamour. However, the movie just misses the finer points — the way women fight over the affection of men and how everyone loses in the process; gaslighting in extreme; how the grand gestures and romantic mythology we have bought into leads us to exploitation; the ways men, especially men with the power or wealth, manipulate and control. At the gala, Frida and Jess are introduced to Slater’s inner circle, consisting of the fine-dining maniac Cody (Simon Rex); the loathsome, on-edge Tom (Haley Joel Osment); Slater’s right hand in life and business, who is curiously missing a pinky, Vic (Christian Slater); the frazzled assistant Stacy (Geena Davis), and Rich, Slater’s therapist with a smooth, unruffled exterior (Kyle MacLachlan). A montage ensues (this film is very reliant on the montage as narrative cheat code) showing Frida and Slater flirting, surrounded by the eager eyes of his friends and the sterile backdrop of an emptier and emptier fundraiser. The flirtation gives way to an invite that turns into a private-jet excursion to his geographically murky private island. Other women are there, including Sarah (Adria Arjona from Hit Man), who so desires Slater that to call her thirsty would be an understatement. Her eyes shoot daggers Frida’s way from the jump when she notices how sweet Slater is on her. This makes their eventual turn from tacit enemies to bound-in-girl-power slayage feel both abrupt and unearned.
As Slater shows Frida around the island, he’s kind-natured, rocking a coquettish gaze and a confident but not cocky grin. He makes jokes, his body language is open. Their chemistry is palpable to everyone around them. It comes across as an uncanny romance that the film doesn’t have the gumption to look at directly. Because of course the truth of the island and whatever nastiness Slater has been carrying out with the support of his gleefully cruel friends will be revealed. It can’t be all luscious meals and endless consumptive delights. Though by then, the film, or more precisely Kravitz’s lens, has seemingly bought into its own fantasy of Slater. You can see it in the raspberries plopped inside Champagne that is always flowing, the poolside tanning, the verdant expanse of the island, the rustic décor inside its buildings, the endless laughter and light, and the quietly ignored brown workers keeping all this beauty afloat. Time stretches and grows languid until Frida doesn’t even know what day it is. When Jess disappears and no one else remembers her, the film should turn on its axis and let the darkness creep out. But its creators seem more interested in painting overconsumption and riches as what everyone secretly desires. So even as the absurdity of a third act that involves snakes and perfumes approaches, the filmmakers’ touch is too light. Cinematographer Andrew Newport-Berra, who impressed me with his work on The Last Black Man in San Francisco, shoots the film with an almost too-bright, frothy quality. The world is as sun-kissed and alluring as a Netflix dating series and just as flatly shot. This aesthetic could work if the frame were more dynamically populated, if there were more visual subtext, if it were encapsulating a script with a gimlet-eyed perspective on the shadows out of frame and the men who inhabit them. But it isn’t. When Jess suggests it’s weird their respective suites come with white linen clothes in their exact sizes, Frida doesn’t think it’s odd, just that it’s a part of being “rich.â€
What’s strangest is the raceless quality of the story — which never explores the prickly currents of Frida’s attraction to a white man of this economic bracket or her experience as a brown-skinned Black woman in such a white milieu. Stuck on the surface of Frida’s story, Tatum’s dexterity as a performer is tested. Toward the end of the film, Slater is found repeating similar verbiage from the video Frida played before the gala, apologizing until he is basically screaming “I am sorry,†spittle flying, face tense, body curved and crouched low. But like any man too self-involved and unhealed to confront the truth of himself, he doesn’t even say what he’s apologizing for. It isn’t entirely Tatum’s fault he can’t physically or emotionally pull this role off. But in the end, his performance is as shallow as the script, lacking the verve and ingenuity that would make Frida’s obsession intriguing. And Kravitz’s camera is too in love with him, too soft-handed to let Tatum be as nasty as the film requires. She hones in on his lips, his arms, his stubble, his smile. It’s too obsessed with the skin of the story to recognize the depths of what an actor’s beauty like Tatum can communicate. Blood is shed, lies are brought to light, yet truth is never found. Blink Twice is ultimately a glimmering bauble that demands to be taken more seriously than it deserves.
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