# Return to Paradise (1998)

### reviewed by
Kristian Lin

    THE MALAYSIAN PRISONER
    by Kristian Lin

RETURN TO PARADISE is about three American tourists who meet and befriend each other in Malaysia: Brooklyn limo driver Sheriff (Vince Vaughn), clean-cut Harvard grad Tony (David Conrad), and hippie activist Louis (Joaquin Phoenix), all carousing in a land of sunny beaches, sexually submissive women and cheap hashish. Sheriff and Tony leave for the States, giving Louis what's left of their hash. Two years later, a lawyer named Beth Eastern (Anne Heche) turns up in Sheriff's limousine. She explains: the day after their parting, the police busted Louis, and all the hash he had made him a trafficker in the eyes of Malaysian law, and subject to the death penalty. Louis's life will be spared only if Sheriff or Tony or both return to Malaysia to claim their share of responsibility for the drugs and serve prison time.

What to do? The dilemma is supposed to give its characters opportunities for courage, cowardice, or redemption, but this dull, self-important movie only shows up how successfully SAVING PRIVATE RYAN covers the same ground. The story takes too long to set up, and the movie goes limp despite its eight-day time frame that's supposed to create tension. The plot twists are cheap and arbitrary, as in the revelation of Beth's real relationship to Louis, or the contrived courtroom climax that no amount of good acting can redeem.

The acting is good, though. Joaquin Phoenix steals the show. His two set pieces from his prison cell are horrifying glimpses of a gentle man brought close to psychic ruin by his isolation and impending death. When Louis tells Sheriff, "There is no God in this place," you feel the terrible force of the words. Jada Pinkett-Smith is saddled with a plot device instead of a character, but watching her play her scene with Anne Heche made me think that THE NEGOTIATOR would have been even more interesting with them in the leads instead of Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey.

Vince Vaughn looks appropriately lumpish for the part (so much so that he bears a disturbing resemblance to Diedrich Bader from "The Drew Carey Show"), and nicely underplays his change from moral weakling to hero. Heche is in fine, anguished form, too. The romance plot between them is a problem, though. Hollywood watchers have been scrutinizing Heche's career to see if she'll make a credible romantic lead now that everyone knows she's gay in real life, which is ridiculous and grossly unfair to an actress who has more than once proven this kind of thinking wrong. That having been said, however, she's lucky that SIX DAYS, SEVEN NIGHTS was viewed as the test case for her viability as a romantic lead rather than this movie, because there's no chemistry going on between her and Vaughn. It doesn't make sense that the dedicated Beth and the vacillating Sheriff would be attracted to each other.

The whole subplot is shoehorned in. Even worse, it's used as the hook for Sheriff's redemption - at the end, he tells her that doing time would be better than losing her love by not going back. Director Joseph Ruben and writers Bruce Robinson and Wesley Strick vitiate their own moral drama because they don't trust us to believe that Sheriff is doing the right thing. For all its ambitions and gritty atmosphere, RETURN TO PARADISE is as phony as any Hollywood action-thriller or comedy, and a good deal less fun.

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