‘Sin Island’ review: Atrocious logic, guilty pleasure

Think of Gino Santos’ Sin Island as a hedonistic cruise, that faraway port you’re itching to forget.

Blatant illogic, luscious gloss

That isn’t to say that the film is good. In fact, it’s actually quite atrocious.

However, it will be wholly inaccurate to say that Sin Island is depleted of any entertainment value. While Santos does a good job in veiling its slightness with seductive gloss, Sin Island remains to be a work whose blatant illogic is both its greatest liability and its wellspring for delicious delights. The characters make the stupidest of decisions, and the sight of them wallowing in the repercussions of their lack of any real foresight is quite a spectacle.

David (Xian Lim) and Kanika (Coleen Garcia) seem to be the perfect couple.

He’s a successful photographer, while she’s a flight attendant. They’ve grown accustomed to each other’s busy schedules, with Kanika satisfied with the fact that her husband is in control. Things drastically change when David, in an unfortunate mishap during one of the weddings he was hired as photographer, gets his blossoming career derailed. He loses his drive, forcing Kanika to be the breadwinner of their household.

The fun begins when David turns into the impossibly pathetic emasculated husband. The film suddenly becomes a cesspool of feebly conceived situations, of domestic squabbles about David’s incapacity, of the beginnings of Kanika’s being enamored with a pilot (TJ Trinidad), of David eventually taking a former assistant’s offer to nurse his beleaguered male ego in a vacation island whose abbreviated name prompts lust and temptation.

Temptation Island

In the island, David meets his masculinity’s savior in the person of Tasha (Nathalie Hart), a rather gregarious lady who shares with him the painful experience of being cheated on.

At this point, the film starts to imagine itself as an erotic trip. (READ: ‘Sin Island’ isn’t your typical Valentine’s Day rom-com)

Unfortunately, the film’s sex scenes, while resourceful with their utility of food and Hart’s charismatic goofiness, are frustratingly tame and Santos can’t seem to make his way around the studio’s limitations. Sin Island is lousy erotica, but again, the lousiness paves the road for it to be enjoyed as a farce, a comedy of unintended errors, of characters whose miserable fates turn out to be punch lines than hinges for any notion of authentic emotion.

The film is hard to take seriously.

It shifts and turns every so often that it is almost impossible to pinpoint what it wants to be. It aspires to relay a message about marriage, while glamorizing and sensationalizing illicit affairs, before morphing into a hilariously preposterous violence spree. Nothing gels. Nothing really makes sense. Everything’s bewilderingly unhinged.

Despite all that, Sin Island is very watchable in the sense that its refusal to surrender to real world reason has resulted into occasional fun moments. – Rappler.com

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ Tirad Pass. Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema.