An interesting film holds you hostage and often you can't look away. This is essentially a murder mystery/adventure that happens to be set on a tropical island, and not convincingly so. It's another tale of a man trying to prove his innocence of murder, and the audience knows from the beginning that he is innocent because he was on the same ship as the victim's daughter (Joan Barclay) when the murder took place. It's only because he ends up with papers that the real murderer took that he becomes a suspect. Cliched tropical island characters, mainly Carmen Laroux, are unbelievable and obnoxious.
Just because you add a Hawaiian theme to musical score to a movie doesn't necessarily make it feel like the setting actually works. Certainly, there is lots of action and attempts at comedy, but there are also extremely slow moments were basically nothing happens. The plot takes forever to get off the ground and that left me uninterested in what was going on. The film never seems to really leave the cheaply-made studio sets which made "Gilligan's Island" look elaborate by comparison.
Just because you add a Hawaiian theme to musical score to a movie doesn't necessarily make it feel like the setting actually works. Certainly, there is lots of action and attempts at comedy, but there are also extremely slow moments were basically nothing happens. The plot takes forever to get off the ground and that left me uninterested in what was going on. The film never seems to really leave the cheaply-made studio sets which made "Gilligan's Island" look elaborate by comparison.