I had never heard of the Fantasy Island series from the 70s/80s before learning of this film. From what I’ve read, it was a very popular and well-liked show that starred Ricardo Montalbán as the man in charge of a mysterious island resort that grants your deepest wishes. It sounded like a fairly simple premise and also featured quite a number of guest stars in its episodes, whilst also providing the typical “be careful what you wish for” messaging all in one.
We’ve gotten a bit of an overabundance of “revitalizations” of age-old, long-dead franchises in recent years, especially since we’re also getting a Sonic the Hedgehog movie this weekend. But given the often unexplored darker aspects of fulfilling one’s wishes in the show, it could be interesting to see what Blumhouse could bring to the table regarding someone’s deepest desires. Unfortunately, director Jeff Wadlow’s Fantasy Island fails on all fronts to do something either fresh and interesting or at the very least worthwhile and entertaining. It’s a melting pot of absurdity and stupidity that leans into heavy doses of hollow scares, cardboard-cutout characters, and a mixture of eye-rolling campiness and predictable setups and revelations.
Five contest winners are invited as guests to the luxurious Fantasy Island, a getaway resort where “anything and everything is possible.” The guests, featuring stepbrothers JD (Ryan Hansen) and Brax (Jimmy Yang), Gwen (Maggie Q), Patrick (Austin Stowell), and Melanie (Lucy Hale), are introduced to the island’s caretaker and host Mr. Roarke (Michael Peña), who guides them each into their own respective fantasies of their deepest wishes and desires. Some of these wishes include reunions, do-overs, excitement, and vengeance. But what they all have in common is that there is something sinister laying beneath them all, and sooner or later, our heroes find themselves at the center of fantasies becoming nightmares.
We’ve seen these kinds of stories play out for who knows how long. We’ve seen these “be careful what you wish for” storylines in television and film for decades. This time around, Wadlow attempts to infuse a more horror-centric tone into the age-old story, but fails to provide anything substantial or meaningful to the story at hand. If anything, the film plays out more like a generic getaway comedy than actual horror. The most “horror” it gets is when it reaches its climactic final 25 minutes, and even then it painfully suffers from tiresome and dull cliché after cliché. It never feels as though it actually tries to scare you or even try to do something interesting. It just feels like the old tv show but with some extra tidbits of horror slapped onto it, and for some reason the filmmakers and writers thought that meant it was different enough.
The story lets nothing feel natural or fascinating. The whole concept surrounding the mysterious island sounds so fascinating and mysteriously intriguing. While I’m sure it was acceptably entertaining when it was a tv show back then, it could’ve been something wildly different and compelling if taken with a new spin. But the script consists of nothing but laughably cringe-worthy dialogue, crickets-inducing comedy, and a predictable, “read-like-a-book” plot you can see coming. To top it all off, we even get a climactic, “shocking” twist in the story that is as stupid, confusing, and ludicrous as you can expect from the people that brought you their other unintentional comedy Truth or Dare back in 2018.
The characters are given neither depth nor personality. Actually, let me rephrase that: They’re either given no personality or WAY too much personality, as is the case with JD and Brax, who have to jarringly and constantly remind us that they’re stepbrothers and that they love making pop culture references. Everyone else, however, are at the other end, in which they give off practically nothing beyond the caricatures they’re given, i.e. machete-wielding survivor (Michael Rooker, for some reason), the ecstatic party bros, etc. You never care for them and their fantasies nor do you root for their eventual emotional payoffs (if you want to call them that). To make matters worse, especially towards the previously-mentioned final 25 minutes, the characters succumb to some majorly bone-headed, illogical acts that will surely act as the last straw for ANY emotional connection you have left for them. Michael Peña is arguably the biggest name in the movie, and he was severely wasted in this movie, reserved only as an expositional dictionary about how the island works and how fantasies work.
Fantasy Island is a complete waste of what could’ve been a compelling new take on a well-received IP. It offers nothing substantial outside of one trope and one bore after another. The characters are shallower than the shore that surrounds the island and the script pays off in bland exposition and cringey dialogue. This movie is all about getting what you wanted and later regretting it. For anyone deciding to watch the movie, however, you don’t get what you want and you later regret having spent an hour and 40 minutes of your life one something as lifeless, dull, and predictable as this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6O30nJ02PU&t=1s&w=585