Alluring surfaces enliven ‘Blink Twice’

 

  Actress Zoe Kravitz makes her directorial debut with Blink Twice, an energetic, often entertaining variation on a theme in which luxury-hungry women suddenly find themselves living lavishly on an island owned by a tech billionaire played by Channing Tatum.

  Kravitz, who co-wrote the screenplay with E.T. Feigenbaum, understands the need to seduce an audience before letting the other shoe drop. Kravitz optimizes the pleasure offered on a tropical island, where the point is to have a good time with fine food, carefully curated drugs, and no money worries.

   Blink Twice is about being captivated by surfaces that promise ease and pleasure, while ignoring indications that something sinister looms.

   Naomi Ackie, who gave a strong but overlooked performance in Whitney Houston: I Want To Dance With Somebody, plays Frida, an ambitious woman who works for a catering company that's running a fund-raising gala for Tatum's Slater King. 

   King says he's stepping down from his company to reflect. He also wants to atone for an offense that presumably went public but which the film never defines. 

    Laying on the soft-spoken charm, Tatum presents Slater as a model of newly acquired consideration and empathy that he attributes to a recent therapeutic epiphany.

    Posing as a partygoer rather than the help, Frida embarrasses herself when she stumbles. Slater puts her at ease.

     Before you can say "glitz," Frida and pal Jess (Alia Shawkat) are elevated from the ranks of servitude. They find themselves on Slater's private jet, living a fantasy of style and privilege.

      Ackie’s performance also suggests that Frida may have found someone who cares about her. If he owns an island, so much the better. It beats the hell out of gig work.

      Other women have been taken on the trip. Slater is also accompanied by a posse of fun-loving male loyalists, played by Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment, Christian Slater, and, later, Kyle MacLachlan.

       Geena Davis portrays Stacy, Slater's assistant, the woman who tends to the details that are supposed to make everyone happy while the women compete for Slater's attention. Stacy also makes sure to collect everyone's cell phone upon arrival on the island, where the women are given the same white outfits to wear. 

        Adria Arjona plays Sarah, a woman who begins to suspect that something terrible may be happening, particularly after Shawkat's Alia disappears. Several of the women can't even remember that Alia had been there. 

      Another sign that there's a dark side to paradise arrives in the form of a stern maid (Maria Elena Olivares), whose forbidding look makes it seem as if she might have dropped in from a horror movie. 

        In some sense, Blink Twice needs the audience to be ahead of its characters. We've been schooled to go along with such things as we wait for Slater's true intentions to emerge.

        Despite its upbeat tempo and sustained glamor, the film eventually must deliver what we know is coming -- a serving of horror that steers Blink Twice into the choppy waters of revenge.

        Kravitz could have done more to modulate the movie's propulsive rhythms, and she takes the movie's  opulence beyond the point of diminishing returns. A concluding coda seems as tricky as it is meaningful.

        Still, Kravitz’s increasingly nasty tropical shenanigans glide through a lively one hour and 42 minutes that suggest a career behind the camera may take Kravitz far beyond Blink Twice's island.

It's not relative: 'Kin' is a misfire

I don't know who thought it would be a good idea to make a movie about a 14-year-old kid who acquires a super-charged weapon and then takes a road trip with his ex-con brother and a stripper. I guess the ignominy rests on the shoulders of the Baker Brothers (Jonathan and Josh), siblings who have expanded their short film Bag Man into a feature that's tainted by bad judgment. Likable young Myles Truitt may have a future as an actor, but even if he were an emerging Olivier, he couldn't turn this cinematic folly into something worthwhile. Truitt plays Eli, the adopted son of a gruff Detroit widower (Dennis Quaid). When Eli's ex-convict stepbrother (Jack Reyner) shows up, the family is sucked into the orbit of a vicious low-life criminal (James Franco in full over-drive mode). Zoe Kravitz's character enters the movie when Rayner's Jimmy takes his younger brother to a strip club as part of their road adventures. The brothers are trying to get away from Franco's character, a vengeful thug who killed their father during a robbery Jimmy arranged in order to pay off a $60,000 debt. Now about that super-weapon: Early on, Eli is scavenging in an abandoned factory when he discovers a weapon that's about the size of an AR-15. The "ray gun" (as Jimmy eventually refers to it) was left by armor-clad figures who fight a battle during the movie's prologue. Are these strange combatants aliens from another world? The movie, which flirts with sci-fi, answers this question during its finale by hammering an explanation onto the already overamped action. Carrie Coon shows up in the latter going as an FBI agent, adding to a viewer's sense of disorientation. (By viewer, I mean me.) What's a fine actress doing in this misbegotten misfire? Sometimes a movie goes wrong here and there, but you pretty much understand what the filmmakers were after. Kin goes wrong almost from the start. Trying to treat a 14-year-old's visit to a strip club as a fun adventure (at least for a while) and then allowing the same kid to blast away at various foes shatters any sense of propriety the movie might have had. Shameful.

'Rough Night' founders -- badly

A strong cast can't save this formulaic and unfunny comedy.

It doesn't matter that the raunchy comedy Rough Night was directed by a woman. It also doesn't matter that Rough Night employs a group of talented actresses that includes the fiercely funny Kate McKinnon.

And while we're on the subject of irrelevance, you should know that it's equally unimportant that Rough Night gives us a much-needed opportunity not take Scarlett Johansson seriously or that the movie makes no fuss about a gay theme with Zoe Kravitz and Ilana Glazer playing former lovers.

Similarly, Jillian Bell's portrayal of the gal pal who Johansson's character has outgrown since the two bonded during dissolute college days is of little consequence.

It doesn't even matter that the movie follows a well-tested formula for crass comedies.

All of these things could have made a difference had this comedy about former college classmates who gather for a bachelorette party in Miami been either perceptive or funny. Maybe, Rough Night isn't funny precisely because of its inability to get close to anything that might be called incisive.

An attempt to darken the comedy -- the women accidentally kill a man they believe to be a male stripper -- isn't handled with enough wit or finesse to save the day. No Weekend at Bernie's, Rough Night arrives on screen as a painful misfire.

Any movie that resorts to cocaine snorting for one of its running gags -- as this one does -- immediately declares itself ineligible for any awards involving imagination.

Even the brilliant McKinnon, who plays an Australian visitor to the US, can't hit the necessary high notes, and the movie leaves us wondering what motivated the filmmakers to encourage McKinnon to channel her inner Naomi Watts.

Although designed as an ensemble comedy, the movie revolves around Johansson's Jess, a woman who has left her hard-partying college days behind to run for the state Senate. Once in Miami, Jess quickly sheds her sense of propriety to join what's supposed to be a fun weekend of clubbing hopping and debauchery.

Now and again, the movie offers scenes involving Jess's fiancé (Paul W. Downs). While the women are trying to be wild in Florida, Downs's character attends a sedate bachelor party. He and his buddies spend an evening at home in New York testing wines. Attendees include comedians Eric Andre, Hasan Minhaj and Bo Burnham, all mostly wasted.

Director Lucia Aniello doesn't do much to explore this bit of role reversal, and Downs's character quickly heads to Miami on a non-stop car trip involving adult diapers, stimulants and beer. Why adult diapers? So there's no need for him to make bathroom stops. A misunderstanding leads Jess's fiancé to believe his impending marriage may be endangered.

In Florida, the women stay at the upscale home of one of Jess's major donors. They also meet a couple of leering swingers played by Demi Moore and Ty Burrell.

Low on creativity, Rough Night at one point finds McKinnon's character feigning sex with the corpse that the women desperately are trying to hide. So, yes, this one tries everything, including a joke about necrophilia. Like the corpse, the joke dies. The movie isn't far behind.

He's a nerd with eyes on Harvard

Flawed but fresh, Dope revolves around an appealing cast.

Several critics have said that director Rick Famuyiwa's Dope is a bit of a mess. They're right, of course.

Dope is one of those scattered movies that fills its 115-minute running time to the bursting point, but Famuyiwa -- who also wrote the script -- may have an excuse. He's trying to capture the raggedy spirit of 90s hip-hop culture as reflected in the life of a high school senior who lives in the hardscrabble Bottoms Neighborhood of Inglewood, Ca.

Famuyiwa builds his movie around Malcolm (an appealing Shameik Moore), a young man who's obsessed with 90s Hip-Hop and who treats his expansive knowledge of the period with exacting discipline.

A smart kid whose main aspiration is to get into Harvard, Malcolm is no idle dreamer. He has the right kind of grades and off-the-charts SAT scores.

Still, the question of whether Malcolm can make it out of his neighborhood looms over the movie.

Malcolm has only two friends: Jib (Tony Revolori), a Latino kid; and Diggy (Kiersey Clemons), a lesbian who's sometimes mistaken for a boy.

Together, these characters form a trio of outliers in a world that's not big on encouragement. Malcolm's high-school adviser, for example, thinks Harvard aspirations are a product of Malcolm's delusions.

That's not how Malcolm sees it. At one point, he tells a girl that he's met (Zoe Kravitz) that she shouldn't accept a limited image of herself. It's more than a pep talk; it's a way of saying that she doesn't have to live down to the expectations of others.

Now, before we go any further, let me assure you that I'm making all this sound a bit more serious than it is. For the most part, Dope is a profane comedy, but one that's built around the kind of entanglements that can develop in a tough neighborhood.

A convoluted plot forces Malcolm into the world of drugs. He meets and impresses a drug dealer named Dom (rapper ASAP Rocky), finds himself at a party where a fight breaks out and inadvertently winds up with a bunch of MDMA. During the chaos, someone stuffs the drugs into Malcolm's backpack.

Knowing nothing about the world of drugs, Malcolm and his pals must find a way out of their jam. Dom, now under arrest, wants his drugs back. Dom's rivals are also after the drugs.

Enough about the plot, which tends to resolve into a series of complications that wrap up with in a breezy style that's not entirely fresh.

Intricacies of plot aside, Malcolm's drug adventures bring him into contact with folks as varied as a shady Harvard grad businessman, the businessman's wild-ass son and his sexually hyped up daughter.

Moore negotiates all of this with a sense of naivety and wide-eyed confusion that's both credible and engaging. With a flat-top haircut and thrift-store fashions, Malcolm seems out of his depth until the movie snaps to attention with a strong and biting finale. Think of it as a bracing coda to what can feel like a less-than-riveting, drug-oriented plot.

Famuyiwa seems intent on shattering racial stereotypes, on providing live-wire jolts of entertainment and lacing it all with social commentary. That's a tall order, and he doesn't entirely deliver, but, when Dope is clicking, it's winningly sure of itself and fun.