CINEMA REVIEW: Blink Twice - blood bath is disappointing ending to intriguing movie

An intriguing premise is disappointingly resolved in a grisly bloodbath in director Zoë Kravitz’s increasingly gruesome, half-realised thriller. The gist is that tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) is sorry for an unspecified faux-pas he has committed. In fact, he’s really, really sorry. Except of course, he isn’t. There’s clearly nothing behind the public apologies from the playboy superbrat even when he sets up some kind of charitable trust as part of his penance. The other part of his penance is that he has bought himself a remote island where he is supposedly reflecting on his errors and living the simple life in preparation for a possible return to the public realm.

Except, of course, he isn’t… as cocktail waitress Frida (Naomi Ackie) and her best mate Jess (Alia Shawkat) discover to their cost. After dreamily scrolling through online stories about him (and somewhat clumsily filling us, the audience, in on his story), Frida and her mate manage to get a gig waitressing at King’s charity gala before slipping on their own glad rags and inveigling their way into his party. They do so with ease. But then again, of course, they do. They haven’t a clue that they are falling into a trap – which comes in the shape of an invite to King’s luxury island.

With him there is a bunch of dodgy blokes. Accompanying the girls is a group of other women who are bizarrely unsuspicious when they discover all the clothing they need is carefully laid out ready for them on this supposedly spontaneous little trip. Jess is quick to realise that something sinister is going on. The rest seem blind to the bizarre local workers who spend their time doing unspeakable things to snakes, behaving oddly and giving incomprehensible warnings. Everyone else is seduced by the endless booze, beautiful pool, endless sun and plentiful drugs.

The tension for the most part, though, builds quite nicely. The real disappointment is in the resolution – and the fact that there are probably just too many other films that Blink Twice makes you think of. Plus, of course, the inspiration for the cruelly exploitative King is just too glaring. There’s not a lot of subtlety here.

In the end, it all turns out to be a revenge movie. There’s a predictable fightback but only along the lines of “If you can’t beat them, join them!” The ladies start to turn the tables… and you start to feel that there is actually less going on here than would first appear. King, however, still finds time to attempt to inject some profundity into it all, musing rather dully on forgiveness and forgetting, the latter being King’s modus operandi, inflicting loss of memory on his victims so he can abuse them again and again.

Channing Tatum does evil rather well, and the build-up is edge of the seat stuff to an extent, but when the full-on killing spree breaks out, you can’t help thinking that a better film would have found a much more interesting way out of it all. Still, it’s a strong performance from Naomi Ackie as she eventually wakes up to the danger.