“The Ballad of Wallis Island” resembles a band that continues playing despite the fact that their instruments are clearly out of tune. It’s a film that keeps plowing ahead despite exhausting its audience right out of the gate as it tells the story of a lonely man who uses his lottery winnings to try to reunite his favorite band to play a solo show just for him. It’s a cute premise that ultimately gets wrung so dry that you’re left waiting for it to finally stop. The majority of its jokes either land flat or are run into the ground. Even worse, it pulls on the heartstrings with such force and impatience that the audience manipulation is palpable in every painfully predictable scene.
It’s a film that is desperately setting out to be a crowd-pleaser, but much like the music within, it can’t stop itself from repeatedly getting in its own way. Emotional beats that would benefit from silence are undercut with jokes, and jokes that hit are washed away by unearned sentimentality. For every potentially charming payoff or enjoyable tune, there are infinitely more mawkish moments.
“The Ballad of Wallis Island” begins with the bitter former member of McGwyer Mortimer (Tom Basden) literally washing up on Wallis Island after falling out of a boat. He has been hired by Charles (Tim Key) to perform a small gig. Broadly, he’s told that it’s for less than a hundred people. Specifically, it’s actually just one: Charles. Making matters more uncomfortable is his former bandmate and ex (Carey Mulligan), who he hasn’t seen in years, has also been invited to the quiet little island. Charles has the money to pay for them to do this abundantly awkward performance because he won the lottery twice, but he is also carrying with him a loss from which he has not fully recovered.
The rest of the film plays out just about as you’d expect, with the former bandmates growing closer before the reasons they broke up come crashing in. This would be otherwise harmless, light fluff, but it has a critical flaw: it relies almost entirely on Charles to be its comedic center. Once you hear one of his jokes, which all are continually premised on him being an incessant talker or just unaware of basic things about the world outside the island, you’ve heard them all. But boy does the film keep telling them.
Even when we meet the occasional local, none of them have any real depth of character or unique personalities. The film essentially becomes a story about being trapped with the obsessive, one-note caricature of a bumbling fellow from whom escape is impossible.
“The Ballad of Wallis Island” takes an emotional turn to fill in his backstory, but it doesn’t take away from just how tiresome it is to be around this guy. If there is anything surprising to the journey it takes us on, it’s how little the always-great Mulligan is utilized and how suddenly she disappears from the film. You only wish you could leave with her, but alas, we stick with Charles until the bitter close.
In the end, “Wallis Island” is less of a ballad and more of a shallow limerick that carries on too long, only memorable because of how much it repeats itself.
“The Ballad of Wallis Island” will release in theaters in the U.S. on March 28.