"Not that the cast can save the mediocre story, Booster and Ricamora's interaction is passionless and cringeworthy, the former is a wrong choice as a romantic lead since he has no bent of showing a character's inscape whereas the latter is particularly wooden for no obvious reasons. Zane Phillips is a hottie exploited only for his physique, with his character's unscrupulousness watered down. If anything, FIRE ISLAND misses an opportunity to put Bowan Yang under the spotlight, not least because this Saturday Night Live breakout is capable of making audience feel for Howie. Only if the writer Booster could be more generous and less self-obsessed, we would've be granted a rom-com crowd-pleaser with a slightly feminine gay man of Asian descent in the center, that is something more potent and beneficent than being superficially racialized. Here, racial difference is casually effaced (everyone acts they're birds of the same feather pigmentation-wise) rather than genuinely explored, that is tokenism with a big T."
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