Tag: channing tatum

Blink Twice and you Might Miss the Thrills and Spills of Zoë Kravitz’s Debut Feature

Blink Twice and you Might Miss the Thrills and Spills of Zoë Kravitz’s Debut Feature

Arnel Duracak

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Blink Twice preview screening provided by Universal Pictures.

It’s 2024 and movie characters in thrillers are none the wiser, still choosing to vacation with strangers on secluded islands in the middle of nowhere. That idea has tickled the fancy of first time director Zoë Kravitz whose star studded feature Blink Twice, which she co-wrote with E.T. Feigenbaum, is ripe with dark humour, bubbling tension, and is gripping from start to finish.

As it turns out, Instagram doesn’t tell you about stranger danger, at least not to Frida (Naomi Ackie). She’s a barely-getting-by waitress who we meet as she’s scrolling through the social media app before finding herself enthralled by millionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) in a strange apology video he’s issued. Whether for better or worse (which becomes clear as the pace picks up), she clumsily meets him while waitressing at a fundraising event with her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat), and when he asks her if she’d like to come to his private island, of course she says yes.

She’s not the only one who takes up his offer to ‘party it up’, as though this is one of Leonardo DiCaprio’s yacht getaways. King has decided to bring a whole group, one that’s comprised of celebrities like Sarah (Adria Arjona), his troupe of mates (Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment, Levon Hawke, Liz Caribel, Trew Mullen, and Kyle MacLachlan), and a few other unsuspecting souls.

Channing Tatum stars as Slater King and Naomi Ackie as Frida in director Zoë Kravitz’s BLINK TWICE, an Amazon MGM Studios film.
Photo credit: Carlos Somonte
© 2024 Amazon Content Services LLC. All Rights Reserved.

The real fun and games commence on the island, which has a sprawling resort-like quality; frequently smiling, somewhat off-kilter staff; slithering snakes; and enough drugs to kill a herd of elephants. It’s hard to think one would ever want to leave when every day seems like a holiday, even if you don’t quite know what day it is and what happened yesterday —that’s all part of the deal, or so Frida tries to tell herself.

For what it’s worth, Ackie’s performance is solid, and when paired with Shawkat (and later, Arjona) she’s really able to lean into the constant state of flux that her character finds herself in. Coming off the back of his performance in Fly Me to the Moon (2024), Tatum is also able to hold his own, playing his rich, handsome but slightly-off/too-good-to-be-true character with a distant edge, proving that he can hold the weight of a tense scene with an equally tense gaze and charming quality.

Where similar debut thrillers like Don’t Worry Darling (2022) often have a promising start, they tend to struggle to bring plot points together in the final act and tailspin within their own twists and turns. In saying that, knowing that this is Kravitz’s debut feature is almost as wild as the film’s premise. Her direction is assured and distinct, and I was often reminded of Jordan Peele and his approach to his debut feature Get Out (2017), from which this film clearly takes inspiration from.

Kravitz’s style is especially evident in the groovy soundtrack and the frequently blunt, yet edgy, but altogether humorous, dialogue. Coupled with Kathryn J. Schubert’s snappy editing, which gives both a feeling of intoxication/trippiness as well as the flittering of time, the title Blink Twice reverberates deep into the film’s technical elements. It also helps that Kravitz is able to get all of her nuts and bolts into roughly 90-minutes where so many filmmakers today struggle to write compact scripts that don’t overstay their welcome. If Blink Twice is anything to go by, we’ll be talking about Zoë Kravitz a lot more in years to come.

Blink Twice opens nationally from the 22nd of August.

Fly Me to the Moon: Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum Team Up for Space Race

Fly Me to the Moon: Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum Team Up for Space Race

Arnel Duracak

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Fly Me to the Moon preview screening provided by Sony Pictures.

As far as films about space go, Fly Me to the Moon is about as far from the launchpad as they come —which is not to say there isn’t a takeoff. Set against the backdrop of the 60s, specifically around the Space Race, Greg Berlanti’s (director of 2018’s Love, Simon) film mixes romance with rockets, focusing on one of mankind’s greatest achievements in the man-finally-meets-moon Apollo 11 mission, while throwing Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum in the mix to see how they bounce off of one another. There’s a sincere, if not contrived aura about Fly Me to the Moon; in other words, it’s incredibly playful, sometimes to its own detriment.

Johansson plays con artist advertiser, Kelly Jones, whose successful career is noticed by the Nixon administration and one of their shady executives, Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson). Moe commissions Kelly to sell the moon landing with her advertising chops. On the other side of the coin is Cole Davis (Tatum), a NASA employee and veteran who oversaw the tragic Apollo 1 mission. Their paths briefly cross in a flirtatious happenstance at a diner, one they thought was just a once off, before they realise they’ll be spending more time together.

Berlanti’s film is surprisingly clever, taking the conspiracy ideas behind the Apollo 11 mission and working them into an original script that satirises this notion playfully. But more than that, Fly Me to the Moon (though too long for its own good) makes good use of its two leads who effortlessly bicker and banter amongst all the turmoil around the launch. In particular, Johansson commands the screen, playing the part with the same zest and reverence for the time as in Asteroid City (2023), proving she could be warped back to the 1960s and fit right into the classic Hollywood setting.

Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) and Cole Davis (Channing Tatum) in Fly Me to the Moon.

It’s almost bemusing that a film like this would cut past streaming and land on the big screen, not because it isn’t deserving of it, but because it seems like a hard sell —even with the Johansson/Tatum pairing. While the Apollo 11 mission was a big deal at the time, it’s easy to see audiences struggling to stay with it for 132 minutes. Characters like Lance (an unsurprising scene stealer in Jim Rash) and Moe inject energy when the pace starts to falter, giving moments like a sequence around building a fake Apollo 11 stage, a much needed boost.

While still a stud at 44, Tatum doesn’t completely bring the same flair as he does in the Magic Mike films or Logan Lucky (2017). His character is there to bear the weight of deceit from Kelly, but he often plays in Johansson’s shadow, even with their enjoyable jabs, serving more as a weight that levels her character out when she’s reaching for the stars faster than others.

Fly Me to the Moon does come at an interesting time though, where conspiracies and disinformation, truth and reality, are as distorted as ever. Though it doesn’t necessarily usher the audience to think a certain way, Berlanti’s film offers food for thought for those familiar with the controversy around the moon landing, and an interesting foot in the door for those that never paid it any mind. It doesn’t quite hit the landing it hopes for, but it’s not short on fuel.

Fly Me to the Moon opens nationally from the 11th of July.