A down-on-his-luck outsider gets entangled with a treacherous wife and the husband plotting her death. The summary by itself makes this movie sound vaguely similar to Red Rock West, another noirish thriller featuring Nicolas Cage. In Grand Isle, however, Cage plays the evil husband instead of the outsider. Oh, there's one other difference: Red Rock West was good.

The movie opens with Walter, Cage's evil husband, shooting a burglar in the back. Flash forward to a detective interrogating a murder suspect covered in blood. The detective is Kelsey Grammer putting on his best Foghorn Leghorn. The suspect is Buddy, the hapless outsider played by Luke Benward. Flash back a ways while Buddy tells his story.

Walter hires Buddy to fix his picket fence, which the burglar fell through when Walter shot him. (This is the only purpose the burglar serves in the story.) KaDee Strickland plays Walter's wife Fancy. Their relationship consists mainly of sneers and derision.

Buddy catches Fancy's fancy. He gets stranded at their house when his car breaks down with a hurricane approaching. Buddy's wife is oddly unsympathetic when he calls to explain his predicament. Considering how vulnerable he is to Fancy's hamfisted flirting, maybe he's already used the old broke-down-in-a-hurricane excuse a few times. After he gets out from under Fancy's heel (literally), Walter pulls him aside and offers him twenty thousand dollars to kill her. Buddy has sex with her instead.

Imagine Walter's surprise when Buddy disappears with Fancy for an hour and she comes back alive. In response, he tries to force Buddy to kill her at gunpoint. Buddy overpowers him and prepares to leave with Fancy in Walter's car, hurricane be damned. Yeah, maybe his wife was right to get indignant about that lame hurricane excuse.

Walter convinces Buddy to take a look at something in the basement before he leaves. When Buddy opens the basement door, Fancy shoots at him. He locks himself inside. The secret Walter wanted him to see is a drugged and incapacitated teenager. Suddenly Walter and Fancy are working as a team. There's a short game of cat and mouse that Buddy loses. Then he wakes up in his truck with the teenager's corpse in the passenger seat.

The story continues crumbling from there. Someone should have told the writers that plot twists aren't as effective when they're arbitrary. The characters of Walter and Fancy aren't even strong enough to call two-dimensional. They're just gibberish.

Cage doesn't go Super Saiyan here like he did in Deadfall or Mom and Dad. He keeps it at more of a low simmer. It's an appropriate choice, but it gives the viewer one less source of enjoyment, and the movie doesn't fill the void with anything else.

Strickland makes a valiant attempt to generate heat with tepid dialogue. Benward is mostly a cipher. I had a chuckle when Grammer referred to Buddy's request for a lawyer as "big city nonsense."

There's not much else to say about the quality of production. It's just run-of-the-mill work in service of a terrible script.

4 out of 10.

Seen on Crackle.