Blink Twice is the Worst Movie of the Year
MGM, 102 minutes
I was fairly certain after watching the abomination that was A Quiet Place: Day One, that I had discovered the “winner” for what would be the worst movie I’d watch in 2024. Well, a new contender has entered the ring. Because Blink Twice is bad. And it’s not “so bad it’s good”-bad; it’s bad in the least fun way possible.
Blink Twice is the directorial debut of Zoë Kravitz, who also co-wrote the script. That makes sense since without nepotism there is a zero percent chance that this movie would’ve been made. Kravitz tries to present us with a film that’s both in the fun style of something more colorful, like a Knives Out-type movie, but also a film that has more of a point/message to it. She stumbles mightily with both goals.
Like the second Knives Out movie, Glass Onion (which I thought was largely fine overall), our story centers on a group of rich people at a secluded location where something sinister is afoot. One thing that the Knives Out movies do really well is present us with creative, memorable characters. Blink Twice finds no such success.
To say that the characters in Blink Twice are paper-thin would be an insult to the thickness of paper. Our protagonist, Frida, played by Naomi Ackie, isn’t particularly likeable or unlikeable. She is instead the worst thing a movie character can be, which is insanely dull and boring. Ackie’s performance is nothing to write home about, but it’s not like she was given anything to work with that makes her character at all interesting either.
The rest of the cast is equally dull. Perhaps Channing Tatum, who plays island-owner/billionaire Slater King, is a nice person in real life, but he cannot act his way out of a paper bag. He somehow finds a way to make a boring, one-note character even more boring. Whatever the opposite of charisma is – he has that in spades.
As far as the story itself, and we’re going to get into some light spoilers territory here (but seriously don’t watch this anyways), the movie centers on women being taken to an island with the promise of a fun getaway. However, the women soon realize that they are having their short-term memories wiped away by evil rich white men, who proceed to sexually assault them at night and then make them forget they have been abused so that they can be abused all over again.
The colorful “rich people having a good time doing rich people thing” aesthetic of the movie (not to mention the fact that the movie is also just horrendously bad) seriously undercuts the seriousness of what is happening to these women. Kravitz clearly wanted to make a film with a message and that message is: Rich white men are evil and will take advantage of women, who need to fight back against them. While trying to get across her “message,” Kravitz proves she has nothing interesting, profound, or of actual substance to say beyond just the simple, basic idea that bad men abusing women is bad. How profound.
At the same time, on a personal level, the director wanted to go to a nice location with her real-life fiancé, Channing Tatum, and have fun playing director. Thus, the setting for the movie.
Blink Twice reeks of being made by someone with privilege. It is a bad movie with bad acting and a bad script. I haven’t even gotten into how insanely boring most of the movie is, but, wow, do we spend a lot of time waiting for something to finally happen. There are huge pacing issues with the film.
I do not recommend seeing Blink Twice. If you do need to sit through it for some unknown reason, your time would be better spent not simply blinking twice, but by closing your eyes for the entire hour and a half and taking a nap. That’s a full sleep cycle. Perfect.
Grade: 2/10