Grand Isle is a 2019 action film about a young father who is charged for murder and must prove his innocence through recalling a very twisted and dark night of events.
It’s the late 1980s and a young man named Buddy (Luke Benward) is trying to make ends meet, working hard to support his wife Lisa (Emily Marie Palmer). Wanting to make money fast and skip a life of labor, that doesn’t pan out so well and he ends up working for Walter (Nicolas Cage), just for some quick cash. However, Walter is not a stable man, prone to alcohol abuse and fits of violence. Worse, there is Fancy (KaDee Strickland), Walter’s off kilter and lonely wife, unhappy in her marriage, excited by the presence of a young virile man on the property. As a hurricane approaches, so to do temptations and Buddy’s soon finds himself in a fury of madness.
Directed by Stephen S. Campanelli, Grand Isle is a seedy conventional potboiler with all the trappings of such, playing out like a how-to instructional manual on, well, how to make a seedy conventional potboiler. This includes the standard dual timeline plot device of starting with a detective and a suspect sitting in an interrogation room hearing about how past events led to the tragedy now at hand. That detective is played by (Kelsey Grammer), strapping on a thick southern drawl and left with little to do but sneer and brumble. He’s in Buddy’s face, trying to get behind why the hungry new father is now squat in the middle of a brutal murder.
With its limited sets and small scope, Grand Isle doesn’t waste a moment of its time trying to step outside the thick lines of its narrow story, with Fancy a rich over-the-top housewife sexually unsatisfied and happy for the opportunity to flaunt some lust at the new worker on the property while a still further (and master of such) over-the-top Cage skulks about downing beers and raising the weirdness to eleven.
While it’s not hard to follow, it doesn’t make much sense, feeling like most of it is wedged into misshapen parts only to try and fit into an end the filmmakers want rather than earn. Despite the ingredients, there just isn’t any umph to any of it, the trope-ish characters and transparent plot points only half filled with potential, try as Campanelli does in creating something impactful. If anything, it’s the film’s style and atmosphere that makes any of this worth watching, even with a host of committed performances.
More problematic though is how the movie deflates, abandoning its central premise of sexual betrayal for something more dark and tinged in horror as bad people get even worse. That might have worked but the movie is a tangled sort of mess that never gets hold of the viewer like it should, forcing itself into corners it can’t get out of it.