The Island is an hysterical and crazily plotted piece of nonsense with a top drawer cast. It features some nasty pirate descendants living in absolute secrecy on a Bahamian island and picking off tourist yachts as they sail by. It also features a bizarrely cast Michael Caine as a New York journalist who finds out about them, only to find himself and his son imprisoned on their island. The action in the movie is surprisingly good, especially a couple of well editted sequences in which the pirates attack a coastguard cutter and Caine massacres the pirates with a machine gun. There is also a weird martial arts sequence in which a tourist aboard a yacht is attacked by the pirates and manages to fend them off with his Bruce Lee style moves, only to be slashed down by one of the buccaneers as he tires. However, other scenes are badly done, such as a totally laughable and unerotic sex scene in which Angela Punch McGregor strips off for Caine and rubs him up with some kind of mud. There's also a terrible explanatory scene in which Frank Middlemass tries to explain why the pirates have remained in secret for so long and must remain so for the good of history. All in all, The Island is pretty bad, mainly because the plot is so wacky. But it has a funny knack of sticking in your mind after you've watched it, and there are, as mentioned before, a few decent scenes which could almost have strayed in from another better movie.
Review of The Island
