Mark Reviews Movies: FANTASY ISLAND

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 14, 2020

Based on the television series of the same name, Fantasy Island might have worked as an anthology movie, in which all of its main characters arrive on the eponymous island one at a time, to have their fantasies fulfilled by whatever magic fuels the place. Maybe those stories would come together in the end. Maybe they wouldn't. It wouldn't matter.

That structure definitely would better fit the mold of its originator, which ran on network TV for seven seasons (and ended before probably about half of the members of its main cast were born). More importantly, it probably would have helped to flesh out the characters, their lives and fantasies, and the mysteries of this most mysterious island.

Instead, the screenwriting team of Jillian Jacobs, Christopher Roach, and director Jeff Wadlow mush the individual stories of six characters, separated into four parties, together in an overarching story that never quite figures out what it wants to be. It doesn't help that all of the stories, although sharing the tendency to insert some kind of ironic twist, are vastly different in terms of tone.

One is a melancholy tale about regret. Another is a wild party that hints at and then turns to violence. A third possesses a sort-of time-travel gimmick, and the final one is a nasty form of revenge horror, in which a young woman physically and emotionally tortures a bully from her past.

Instead of giving us a chance to experience each one on its own, the filmmakers intercut between them, because this isn't really a movie that cares about its characters or its central gimmick—either as a straightforward sort of wish fulfillment or as a wicked spin on that concept. It's all about creating as much mystery as possible.

The five main players are Melanie (Lucy Hale), Gwen (Maggie Q), Patrick (Austin Stowell), and brothers-by-marriage JD (Ryan Hansen) and Brax (Jimmy O. Yang). All of them have won a contest to come to Fantasy Island, where their deepest desires will be fulfilled.

The brothers want "everything," so they're brought to a giant mansion, where attractive people in swimsuits party all night. Things go wrong, though, when they realize anyone who has "everything" probably got it from someone else.

Gwen regrets turning down the marriage proposal of a man five years ago. She gets a chance to change her mind and to start the family she always wanted, only to discover that she misses the years between the proposal and today.

Patrick wanted to enlist in the military like his late, hero father before him. When his mother objected, he became a cop, a job that became boring after a certain "incident," instead, so he gets his chance to play soldier in the jungle. He meets a recognizable face.

Melanie was cruelly bullied by a classmate when she was younger, and her fantasy is to get revenge. When she goes down to the resort's lowest level, sure enough, there's Sloane (Portia Doubleday), the hated bully, gagged and tied up to a chair. Melanie, thinking it must be a hologram of the woman, has a room filled with buttons and switches that can inflict pain and reveal Sloane's dirty secrets to the world. The twist is that there's no hologram.

The movie is in such a rush to establish some kind of mythology about the island, as well as its enigmatic and rule-abiding manager Mr. Roarke (Michael Peña), that it doesn't allow the characters and their individual stories to reveal their potential merits. The assorted twists and ironies don't have any time to breathe, before the screenplay throws more and more at us—from a lone man (played by Michael Rooker) spying on the guests from in the woods, to the various rules that seems to be made up in the moment, and to the ultimate discovery that all of these people are connected by some tragic event in their pasts.

In the third act, during which all of the characters are reunited through some coincidental alignment of their separate fantasies and the eventual revelation that all of this is just part of a bigger fantasy, the screenwriters really fumble. Even the mystery isn't enough. They have to explain everything, and they do so in some particularly silly ways, involving an ancient cave, a mystical rock, and dark water.

Fantasy Island spends far too much time hinting at and finally establishing this mythology—dragging it out, really, until the last possible moment. In the process, it misses out on the potential—and the potentially nasty—ways of subverting these fantasies, as well as the source material.

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