Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls

Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls is an earnest effort to recreate the spirit of Airplane!, the 1980 farce that turned the airliner-disaster genre (Airport, Airport 1975, etc.) into a vehicle for hilariously obvious sight gags, ridiculous puns, and movie clichés. Writer-director Bryan Michael Stoller updates the idea here by poking fun at contemporary hits such as Cast Away, Miss Congeniality, The Sixth Sense, Jurassic Park, and the remake of Planet of the Apes, but the jokes are hit and miss and the project grows tiring very quickly. The cast, however, largely made up of unknowns, is game, with everyone on the same page in terms of satiric tone, and while Eric Roberts is the big name actor here, he remains part of the ensemble. The story, such as it is, concerns a planeload of beauty pageant contestants who crash into the ocean and have to survive on an uncharted island with the flight's egocentric captain (Roberts). But the big draw for rubberneckers here is Michael Jackson's brief appearance as a holographic federal agent. Not a necessary purchase. (T. Keogh)