Fantasy Island (2020)

Blumhouse's Fantasy Island arrives with the confidence of a franchise revival and the soul of a spreadsheet. Five contest winners land on a tropical resort where wishes come true, then curdle, and the resulting ninety minutes plays like a haunted house assembled from spare parts. Jeff Wadlow directs with efficiency and no real conviction. Michael Peña presides as Mr. Roarke with a weary calm that the material does not quite deserve, and the ensemble is unusually diverse for a genre exercise of this budget. Maggie Q, Jimmy O. Yang, and Portia Doubleday all get real screen time. None of it is asked to mean anything, and it does not.

A close reading of the film's social content yields mostly silence. The stepbrothers J. D. and Brax are an interracial adoption, mentioned once and never examined. There is no LGBTQ+ presence, no economic grievance, no environmental alarm, no commentary on bodies or brains. Melanie's campaign of revenge gives the film a woman at the center of its machinery, and Maggie Q carries the procedural half with a straight back, but the screenplay offers no argument about either. This is a horror film that wants to frighten people, not instruct them. It fails at the first and never attempts the second.

Left standing is a pulpy reimagining of a 1977 television series, which is a curious thing to exhume. The reviews were savage, the box office was healthy, and the film ends by renaming a character Tattoo, an act of franchise maintenance that borders on the ceremonial. We have sat through worse. We have sat through better. The ledger here is remarkably clean: a horror movie that preaches nothing, argues nothing, and represents almost nothing beyond the needs of its own plot. For once, the absence of a message is not a failing. It is simply an absence.