Mark Reviews Movies: GRAND ISLE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 5, 2019

A neo-noir in the key of Southern Gothic, Grand Isle is appropriately overblown but unfortunately half-baked. The elements of a seedy potboiler are established well enough by screenwriters Iver William Jallah and Rich Ronat, but when it comes time for the payoff, we only get a series of anticlimactic revelations and confrontations.

The tale revolves around a relative innocent—the all-too-appropriately named Buddy (Luke Benward), a naïve veteran of the Navy. A new father, he's struggling to make some money, so that his wife Lisa (Emily Marie Palmer) doesn't have to work.

An opportunity for quick cash comes from Walter (Nicolas Cage), a mercurial Marine vet, who wants the fence in front of his isolated estate fixed before a hurricane hits. Buddy also meets Walter's long-suffering and flirtatious wife Fancy (KaDee Strickland), who looks at the young man like he's an appetizing treat.

The hurricane does hit. To make matters worse, Buddy's truck won't start, meaning that he's stuck with the bitter and resentful couple overnight.

Things aren't going to turn out too well. We can gather that from the situation, especially when Walter offers Buddy $20,000 to kill Fancy—an act of mercy, in Walter's mind, because his wife, he says, is terminally ill. We also know it, because, in some framing scenes, Buddy, covered in wounds and blood, is being interrogated by a local detective (played b Kelsey Grammer) about a murder—for which he's the prime suspect.

Director Stephen S. Campanelli approaches this material with an admirable sense of the absurdity of it all. The actors (save for Benward, who has to play the straight man to the heightened personalities around him) chomp on their dialects and the scenery. Cage is in his more unpredictable mode here, prone to random and maniacal outbursts. Strickland plays the femme fatale with relish, while also suggesting something darker beneath the come-hither stares.

There is something far more sinister than a doubly extramarital affair, a toxic marriage, a murder plot for money, and the constant roar of the storm at play here. The error, perhaps, is not that it comes out of the blue, re-adjusting our understanding of these characters and their schemes, but that Grand Isle treats the underlying truth as an afterthought. The movie's build-up is far too sleazy and frenzied for it to rush to such an unsatisfying, underdeveloped resolution.

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