Fairs & Islands

Fairs, Fixed Games, and Failed Backhands – Islands (2024)

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, we’re off to the fair and then straight to the Canaries for a slow-burn midlife crisis with added camel corpse.

We kick off with our Top 5 Fairs – everything from sinister funfairs and pleasure islands that definitely aren’t safeguarding-approved, to world expos, tunnel-of-love metaphors, and the sheer horror of Simply Red – Fairground lodging itself in your brain for days. Along the way there’s a rollercoaster quiz nobody asked for, Orson Welles on a Ferris wheel treating people like ants, and the usual detours into Bruce Springsteen, Brighton Rock, and Tom Hanks getting magically statutory in Big.

Our main feature is Islands (dir. Jan-Ole Gerster), starring Sam Riley as a washed-up ex-tennis pro coasting through life as a resort coach in Fuerteventura. His days are a loop of hangovers, half-arsed lessons and meaningless flings… until a young British family arrive, bringing:

• A talented 7-year-old with a suspiciously decent backhand
• A magnetic, possibly femme-fatale mother who may or may not be telling the whole truth
• A lad-mag husband who promptly disappears after a night out

We dig into:

• Riley’s quietly brilliant, physically lived-in performance as a man sleepwalking through his own life
• The film’s sun-drenched, slightly haunted resort vibe – all sand dunes, empty courts and bad decisions
• Class, envy and the gap between “living the dream” and being totally stuck
• That unforgettable helicopter-lifted dead camel shot, and what it says about escape, failure and being in too deep

If you like your films low-voltage but tense, your characters deeply flawed, and your movie chat filthy, tangential and only loosely under control, this is a strong entry point into the pod.

Hit play, take a swing, and see if you make it off Trash Island for grown-ups.

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Until next time, we remain...

Bad Dads