A film about a billionaire who takes a bunch of women to his private island where evil and debauchery runs amok?  Where have I heard the story before?

Last year, the film ‘Sound of Freedom’ was a movie that looked to shed light on the world of human trafficking, specifically child tracking, that takes place in our world today.  The media’s reaction to that film was hostile, not because of anything regarding the quality of the movie but because of the subject matter.  The media attacked the ‘Sound of Freedom’ because they didn’t like that the film was opening people’s eyes to the secret world of sex trafficking that the richest and Elite of our society create, especially the trafficking that involves children.

Fast forward one year and the latest movie from Amazon MGM Studios Is flirting with similar themes, instead of seeking to raise awareness of a serious problem, this movie looks to present the problem as a form of entertainment.  Zoe Kravitz was somehow given $20 million to write, direct, and produce her very own film that is all about the evil things that happen on the private island of the rich and the elite.

While some of you guys are all already drawing parallels to a well-known story of the man who will simply be referred to as Jeffrey,  the elephant in the room regarding this film is asking the question Is Hollywood now given the green light to make content about the Jeffrey situation,  a situation that they were rumored to be involved with?  or is Hollywood presenting to us reality under the thinly veiled guise of fiction.

I guess there’s one way to find out.

Blink Twice is a film about a couple of cocktail waitresses named Frida and Jess who are stuck in the low life but thirst for something more. Frida becomes infatuated with billionaire tech mogul Slater King played by Channing Tatum. After meeting him at a charity event, Frida and Jess decide to travel with him to his private island for a luxurious party for the next few days.

The group of parties spend days drinking, doing drugs, and partying hard as one day after another passes with little incident. It is only when Jess is bitten by a snake that she begins to panic that something is not right with the island and Frida begins to regain her memory of what is going on behind the scenes. 

There’s one word that captures the messaging and the reaction revolving around this movie,  hypocrisy.  ‘Blink Twice’ is a film that showcases the peer and unadulterated hypocrisy stemming from Hollywood’s #MeToo Movement.  Some of you guys may have been surprised to notice that this film came with a trigger warning before the movie.  Zoe Kravitz understood that some of the images of women being abused could be a little bit triggering for modern audiences.  The problem here is that the surface-level concern about the well-being of women in society is exposed in this film whether Zoe was looking to do so or not.

In the film, a group of women are taken to a private island that they all consensually agree to go to.  At face value,  the women saw an opportunity to party in Mingle with super-rich Elites on a private island and viewed it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attach themselves from their regular boring lives and go to something better. Whether intentional or not this is a perfect allegory to what happens to Women the second they enter the Hollywood industry. 

On one hand, the industry wants you to feel terrible for the women who were taken advantage of by the men in a powerful industry although they were looking to obtain personal gain even if it meant looking the other way.

The problem here is that when the film, much like the industry, gets an opportunity to set things right, it no longer becomes about abuse, it becomes about power.  The character of Frida is a girl who works a regular 9 to 5 job whose everyday life is terminally online,  so when she gets an opportunity to go away with a billionaire she jumps on it.  Despite Freda being the protagonist of this movie she is not the good guy.  When her friends plead with her that something is going on,  instead of listening and accepting that things are not what they seem, she pleads with her friend to not ruin things for her because Frida wants to continue to live in the LIE even at the cost of the truth.

The deeper into the film you get the more you realize,  Frida is not concerned about the well-being of the women on the island because when she has an opportunity to set things right towards the end she takes a deal that gives her the power and control that the oppressive men have obtained which now puts her in the driver’s seat to be just as bad as a person as everyone else. Frida is the perfect Avatar for modern women in Hollywood today.  They knew all about the abuses that were going on behind closed doors and they allowed it to happen because they were more worried about protecting their status than the abuse that was happening in their industry. Instead of destroying the system that led to so much abuse, women like Frida just want to be the ones in control of it. 

You could tell that Kravitz did not have much to work with outside of the initial premise and how she wanted to end the movie. For a movie that has over 100 minutes and run time,  the film struggles to progress the story and keep audiences engaged.  a nearly 25-minute sequence of the movie of All-Star characters doing the same routine of eating fancy food, getting high, and running around the compound.  You only needed to do this a couple of times before the audience understood what was going on but Kravis could not figure out at which point to move on to the next part of the story.

For those wondering if the trigger warning at the beginning of the movie was justified, the answer is no,  the film has a couple of brief scenes of implied rape that come and go. As far as the casting of this movie goes,  you’ll recognize a bunch of Faces in this film yet no one stands out as far as acting goes.  Channing Tatum who stars in the movie and dating Zoe Kravitz tries his best to be the most convincing bad guy for the sake of his girlfriend’s movie. Other actors like Christian Slater and Haley Joel Osment are in the movie to play the role of generic slimy men and don’t offer much more than that.

The question that gets asked repeatedly while watching this movie is are you having a good time?  and much like the women in this film, the answer to that question is no. The only thing that Blink Twice managed to accomplish that an attempt to make a statement about forgiveness and the abusive power structure,  Zoe Kravitz unintentionally makes a film with a message as clear as day money and power matter more than anything else and that’s how we got in this position in the first place.

1.5/5

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