'Blink Twice' If You Want To Kill All The Billionaires
#286: "Blink Twice," "The Union," "Get Shorty," "First Man"
Edition 286:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: Zoe Kravitz tries her hand at directing with a female revenge fantasy, and Mark Wahlberg keeps cashing Netflix checks for dreck. But my two streaming recs are fantastic! In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” a high school party goes berserk over killer technology.
Blink Twice
A good movie needs, in my estimation, at least three good ideas. One idea might get you through a sketch, two can sustain an episode of television, but to carry a feature-length story I think you need three.
This isn’t exactly rocket science — premise, turn and resolution are kind of the basic building blocks of any script — yet you’d be surprised how often movies try to run out the clock on one idea. This is something I talked about with Cocaine Bear (a bear does cocaine and…that’s it!), and has plagued the last handful of M Night Shyamalan movies (great premises that wear out their welcome).
Blink Twice is an example of a two-idea movie. Zoe Kravitz, an excellent actor and hall of fame nepo baby, takes her first turn in the writer/director’s chair for this female revenge fantasy starring her real life fiancé Channing Tatum as a billionaire playboy who lures women to his private island for drunken debauchery with his rich white cronies.
That’s the first idea, and it’s a good one. Billionaires as super villains is a well-worn concept now, but it’s something I advocated for starting 10 years ago after Ex Machina, because the infinite resources at his or her (usually his) disposal allows for not only beautiful settings but also the narrative leeway for heightened and even ridiculous story logic. “Isn’t it weird they had outfits for us in our rooms?” one character asks early in the movie. “I think it’s just…rich” the other replies. We as an audience buy that explanation immediately.
It’s no great mystery that something shady is happening on the island, just out of the camera’s reach. In fact, Kravitz takes great pains to tip you off, whether it’s the straining strings-heavy score or insert shots that bring to the audience’s attention what appears to be something like glitches in the utopian Matrix.
The goal, it seems, is to create a pressure cooker similar to what Jordan Peele does in his movies. This movie wants terribly to be Get Out, a movie with four or five great ideas that doesn’t lose steam once it starts unwinding its mystery but rather gathers momentum toward its wild conclusion.
The second idea of this movie, which I won’t spoil the specifics of, basically comes down to “aren’t rich white dudes the absolute worst?” To anyone who has been watching the movie to that point, the answer is…duh! (And the irony is not lost on me that Kravitz is marrying one of those rich white guys.)
The reveal here does carry some shock value with the help of violent imagery — so much so that the it displays a “trigger warning” on screen before the movie starts — but the payoff ends up being a bloody, Tarintino-esque rampage that gets the audience to cheer for the same violent brutality, so long as it’s inflicted upon the privileged class.
As a straight thriller, the movie is compelling scene to scene, with strong performances from lead Naomi Ackie (most recently Whitney Houston in her biopic) and especially secondary lead Adria Arjona, who now has the second breakout performance of the year after Hit Man and is headed for stardom i nthe coming years. It’s also helpful that the cronies are played by recognizable faces including Christian Slater, Kyle MacLachlan, Haley Joel Osment and Simon Rex, who wring out every ounce of drama from what could’ve been pure ridiculousness.
I admire the ambition to reach for more than that with this movie, but its depth ends up being something like a narrativized Ted Talk on repressed memory and cancel culture. At a certain point, the over-therapized filmmakers of Hollywood will realize that anchoring every character motivation in past traumas has become tiresome for audiences. For any movie that wants to take itself “seriously,” and complicate its heroes beyond hollow joke machines (cough Glen Powell cough Ryan Reynolds cough cough), emotional scarring from past trauma simply cannot be the only ingredient added to the stew.
When put together, Blink Twice is one good idea short of excellence. It’s an entry into what I’ve recently been calling the Forgettable Middle, movies that are pretty good but don’t leave much of a lasting impression either on the year’s slate of movies or my long-term imagination.
This class of movies has value as an entertaining programmer, but unfortunately, in a landscape where people only turn out for can’t-miss event movies, it’s unlikely to move the needle.
Something New
The Union (Netflix): Mark Wahlberg’s ongoing collaboration with Netflix has set a new standard for B-movie schlock in recent years with projects like Spenser Confidential, Me Time, and now The Union, nominally an action movie co-starring Halle Berry in which…try to follow me here…a secret intelligence agency tries to stay incognito by…hiring blue collar workers with no exceptional traits or skills?? I hope Wahlberg, Berry and mission director JK Simmons were well paid.
The main reason I even bring this movie up, other than to beg you not to waste your time on it, is to highlight that this is yet another movie that chooses to have its romantic leads NOT kiss, much like Twisters. And the reason given was the same — to create anticipation for sequels (plural). In this case, thinking about two sequels to The Union makes me nauseous, but even if the movie was as ~fine~ as Twisters I’m not sure if the kiss-less trend points to a Gen Z cringe allergy (as some have theorized) or a general gutlessness among filmmakers, who I suppose can avoid criticism by never committing to anything too hard (except to the multiple sequels!).
Something Old
Get Shorty (1995, Max): This neo-noir adaptation of the famous Elmore Leonard novel is fast becoming one of my “hall of fame movies,” the ones I look forward to re-watching every year. In classic noir fashion, there’s a dozen or more intertwining characters twisting together in a convoluted plot that sends pop culture-obsessed bounty hunter Chili Palmer (a great role for John Travolta) from Miami to Los Angeles, where he simultaneously gets mixed up in the film business and the criminal underworld.
It’s hilarious as a send-up of Hollywood and Los Angeles, propulsive as a crime caper, and razor sharp in its writing, a credit both to Leonard’s original ideas and the work of GOAT screenwriter Scott Frank and director Barry Sonnenfeld. Danny Devito plays a narcissistic movie star, Gene Hackman a striving indie producer, Rene Russo a scream queen actress. Delroy Lindo, Dennis Farina, James Gandolfini, and a couple other recognizable faces round out the perfectly positioned cast.
One new observation I had this time, having just rewatched Pulp Fiction, was how much of an impact Tarintino’s vision of 90s LA had on this movie just three years later. It’s subtle, but the look and feel of the city as kind of a crime-infested fantasyland bears striking resemblance. Anyway, if you’ve never seen it you’re in for a great time.
Something to Stream
First Man (Netflix): I realize I’m playing the hits a bit this week, but I got extremely excited when I saw Netflix added my No. 1 movie of 2018 recently and were giving it the algorythmic bump. It’s absolutely insane how few people have seen Damien Chazelle’s masterful biopic of astronaut Neil Armstrong, which presents a completely different (and better) take on the space race to this year’s glossy, phony Fly Me To The Moon.
It’s one of the most tactile, mechanical movies of all time, making a viewer feel the turn of every screw and the grind of every low-tech gear that carried humanity to space, while inspecting the merits of his masculinity and his ambition. Now that it’s on the Big Red Machine, it’s time for people to start appreciating this movie!!
Trailer Watch: Nobody Wants This
This movie is literally (well, I guess not literally) about how crazy it would be if an Alex Cooper stand-in started dating a Jewish Rabbi. Yeah. It’s a concept I’m already wary of, especially from Netflix (or should I say “New Hallmark”), but the biggest problem I have with this trailer is that the characters are acting and talking like 25-year-olds who are nonetheless being played by Kristen Bell and Adam Brody, who are both very clearly 44 years old. I’ll say it one more time — LET MORE YOUNG PEOPLE LEAD MOVIES!