Fantasy Island (2020)

Fantasy Island or Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island as the BBFC Certificate has it sees a group of irritating people arrive on an island where their fantasy comes true and after a while things go wrong. The rules are stated at the beginning which is that people are only allowed one fantasy and it must be seen to the end. 

The problem isn’t that all the characters are extremely irritating even though they are. It took me five minutes to come to that conclusion and that I wanted them all to meet a grizzly death. The fact that three of them didn’t was a source of annoyance for me. The problem isnt that despite setting out the rules, the film decides to change the rules. Even though they were told that once a fantasy starts it can’t be stopped, Gwen gets to change her fantasy when it turns out to be too good. Another convenient change comes right at the end when Brax is told that the fantasy he went through was his brother’s and that he gets his fantasy which is to bring his brother back. 

The main problem is that its very dull. I was waiting for something to happen and for people to get killed off but the film doesn’t do that and instead takes a very long time to set up the main twist of the film that everyone bar Melanie who brings everyone to the island to exact revenge because they were involved in her boyfriends death. That would have been a much reveal had it happened 30-40 minutes earlier. At 1 hour and 49 minutes long, its way too long and suffers from a lot of padding. Even with multiple characters the film doesn’t seem to know how make it all work. All the performances are fairly wooden even when Melanie’s true identity is revealed I didn’t care because the film had long past point of me caring. Roarke spent 95% of the film playing the villain and refusing to disobey the island and then he gets one speech from Gwen and five seconds later he decides to change his mind. That’s the quickest character change I can recall. 

Fantasy Island is one of the worst movies I have seen for a while and the worst I have seen at the cinema for many years. Even Cats was more entertaining and the flaws with the film kept my attention. Fantasy Island is just a mess from start to finish and even Michael Rooker cant save this turkey.