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Billionaire Long Ye's (Liu Hu) son has just died ... no, not quite, but he
will if he doesn't get a new heart within 50 hours. Now that'd
problematic enough as it is, but the boy has a rare blood type,
which makes it harder to find a hert for him than a needle in a haystack.
However, Long Ye is quick to find and kidnap not only one but seven
potential and unwilling heart donors all over Asia and from all different
walks of life and take them to his private island, but before he picks the one unfortunate enough to donate
his or her heart, Long Ye sends them all through a maze of bizarre death
traps, torture devices and the like, a maze that costs two of the
kidnapped donors their lives. This way, Long Ye wants to determine ... er,
I have no idea what he wants to determine, no matter how you twist and
turn it, it makes no sense. Anyways, as if these death traps were not
bad enough as it is, there's also an assassin on the premises, whose
employer apparently doesn't want Long Ye's son to get his heart. The
assassin isn't too competent though, so he ends up injured, bruised and
battered without having hurt a single soul. Eventually, Long Ye has made
his choice, only to learn that exactly the girl he has chosen is actually
not the girl he wanted, thus doesn't have a heart he can use. From this
on, it doesn't take Long Ye long to find out his second-in-command has
actually played a dirty trick on him, has also sent the assassin - and all
becasue he was jealous of Long Ye's boy. It's only now that Long Ye
realizes what a self-centered asshole he has been, so he lets his
second-in-command leave (who of course soon blows himself up in an
accident), lets his son die and reconciles and parties with his surviving almost-heart
donors, who totally forgive him that he has tried to kill all of them (and
succeeded in two cases) only a few hours ago ... Ok, the
premise of this film is not just silly, it's absurdly silly. That's why
this could have made a good movie though, a bizarre action farce that
deliberately takes apart and pokes fun at genre traditions. But this is
not the kind of movie The Island is: This film's irony is kept to
an absolute minimum, and the fact that director Feng Chao has no idea of
comic timing might have very much to do with that. So instead of picking
up on the absurd aspects of the script, he just likes shiny surfaces, puts
an over-emphasis on his set designs, fills the film up with embarrassingly
wannabe-fashionable flashy camerawork, uses slow motion sequences without
rhyme or reason, and throws in CGI-effects at the least opportune moments
(like signaling location changes by Google Earth-like animations).
That the film isn't even well-paced (the more than feeble set-up of the
thing takes almost a third of its running time) doesn't help much either. It
would have been cool if this was a well-made farce, but as it is it's just
a missed opportunity.
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find The Island at adultvideouniverse.com
