Grand Isle (2019)

(On Cable TV, June 2020) Nicolas Cage is certainly cranking out the films in his older back-tax-paying age, and while Grand Isle isn’t a particularly good Cage film, you can see why he was cast in it. A southern Gothic in which a young man is invited in a vast mansion by a man intent on hiring him to kill his wife, it’s a film with a kernel of potential. Despite the film’s low budget, it’s credibly set in the sweaty humid hurricane-prone atmosphere of Louisiana. The age-old setup has a warring couple making demands on the younger stranger brought among them—in the middle of a hurricane, in an old Victorian house, no less. The nervy sound design, with wind and thunder, is designed to keep up on our toes during it all. In the cast, Cage is Cage (although maybe not as intensely as we’d prefer), while KaDee Strickland shows some potential as a femme fatale and Kelsey Grammer is quite enjoyable as a southern lawyer in the framing story. Alas, those promising elements are eventually blown away, most notably during a scattered third act that keeps going long after the action should have been settled and in doing so breaks the time/space unity that thrillers should keep in mind. (It also introduces a different dramatic arc that is resolved very quickly afterward, and doesn’t do much except allow Cage to be shown with a different hairstyle.) Grand Isle’s production history suggests that the production ran out of money before shooting the last two days of filming, but I have a hard time imagining that even one more week would fix what’s flawed here. The only consolation is that if you didn’t like it, well, there are five other 2019 Nicolas Cage movies to help you feel better.