109 min | PG-13 | February 14, 2020 | Columbia Pictures
Guests win a trip to an island where Mr. Roarke makes every fantasy come true. Then the fantasies start collecting on the debt. It is a premise built for dread and a movie that forgot to bring any.
Guests win a trip to a remote luxury resort run by Mr. Roarke. He promises to make their deepest fantasies come true. The fantasies curdle into nightmares within hours. Jeff Wadlow takes the campy premise of the 1970s television series and bolts a horror engine onto it. The film wants to be a cautionary tale about wishes and consequences. It never decides whether it is a slasher, a thriller, or a redemption story.
Michael Peña plays Mr. Roarke with a placid smile that hides the machinery underneath. He underplays every line and it is the smartest choice in the film. Maggie Q plays Gwen Olsen with real regret as a woman who wants to undo one decision. Lucy Hale plays Melanie Cole as a revenge fantasy that turns back on her. Jimmy O. Yang and Austin Stowell handle the brothers with comic energy the script does not earn. Michael Rooker shows up as Damon and growls exposition that the plot needs and cannot deliver any other way.
Jeff Wadlow directs from a script he wrote with Christopher Roach and Jillian Jacobs. The screenplay stacks twist on twist until the rules of the island stop meaning anything. The cinematography shoots the tropical locations in flat daylight that drains the menace from a horror premise. The editing cross-cuts four separate fantasies and builds tension in none of them. The production design treats the resort as a postcard rather than a trap. The score swells on cue and tells you how to feel because the images do not.
The good idea is buried under a plot that keeps explaining itself. A story about getting what you wish for needs discipline and dread. This film has neither. Peña commits to a role the writing abandons. The island promises anything you can imagine. The movie delivers a connect-the-dots ending that imagines very little.