Taglines: Give up three years of their lives or give up the life of their friend. They have eight days to decide.
Return to Paradise movie storyline. Lewis, Sheriff and Tony are three American guys who meet and hang out one summer at the beach huts of Malaysia. There they enjoy the luxuries of women, rum and hashish. As the summer ends, Tony and Sheriff go back to New York, but Lewis decides to go to Borneo to help save the orangutan. But before he got the chance to leave, he was arrested for possession of the leftover hash and sentenced to death because he was considered to be trafficking.
Two years go by and Sheriff and Tony are living their lives peacefully in The Big Apple when Lewis’ lawyer tells them the news: three years each if they both go, six years if one goes, Lewis’ death if neither go. Although they both do not want Lewis to die, they do not know him well enough to really want to sacrifice three years of their life to a Third-World prison. “Return to Paradise” watches Sheriff and Tony as they struggle to decide in the short period of time.
Return to Paradise is a 1998 American drama-thriller film directed by Joseph Ruben, written by Wesley Strick and Bruce Robinson, and starring Vince Vaughn, Anne Heche, and Joaquin Phoenix. Return to Paradise is a remake of the 1989 French film Force majeure. The film had its premiere on August 10, 1998, and was released to theaters on August 14, 1998.
Principal photography began in November 1997, in locations including New York City, Philadelphia, Hong Kong, Phuket, and Macau. Return to Paradise made $2,465,129 in its opening weekend in the United States (ranking 14th overall at the box office) for a per theater average of $2,554. The film’s eventual domestic gross of $8,341,087 failed to recoup its $14 million budget.
Film Review for Return to Paradise
A sybaritic Malaysian idyll at the start of ”Return to Paradise” leaves a nightmarish aftermath throughout the rest of the story. In this brooding drama of friendship and moral responsibility, directed with somber intelligence by Joseph Ruben (”Sleeping With the Enemy,” ”The Stepfather”), three friends endure the life-threatening consequences of a foolish mistake. Sheriff (Vince Vaughn), Lewis (Joaquin Phoenix) and Tony (David Conrad) cap off their post-college frolicking with a carelessness that ensnares Lewis. When the story picks up again, two years later, Lewis may have only eight more days to live.
Sheriff, the cavalier member of the trio, is the one most responsible for Lewis’s fate. It was Sheriff who wrecked a rented bicycle, causing its owner to summon Malaysian police. And it was Sheriff who tossed a small brick of hashish into Lewis’s trash bin, not realizing the police would find it. Although Lewis was the only one of the trio who planned to stay in Asia and do worthwhile work (with orangutans), he finds himself imprisoned as a drug dealer. Unless his friends come forth and accept their legal culpability, Lewis will surely hang.
”Return to Paradise” is loosely based on a 1990 French film called ”Force Majeure,” which is not to be confused with the Bruce Wagner novel of that title. But the film’s tone is often darkly cynical in ways that bring a writer like Mr. Wagner (”I’m Losing You”) to mind. As written by Wesley Strick with the actor and filmmaker Bruce Robinson (”Withnail and I”), the film zeroes in on subtle negotiations between Lewis’s erstwhile friends and his fiercely dedicated lawyer, played in another sharply etched performance by Anne Heche. The film’s cool, sober texture and its clever characters are often more interesting than the larger plot.
As Sheriff, Mr. Vaughn (like Michael Keaton, whom he sometimes resembles) projects a deep-seated skepticism and chilliness that give the story its suspense; he seems quite capable of keeping his distance and leaving Lewis to die. And Mr. Phoenix, though not often seen after the film’s vivid Malaysian prologue, conveys the terrible pathos in Lewis’s situation.
But as Ms. Heche’s formidable Beth Eastern does her best to manipulate the other characters on Lewis’s behalf, ”Return to Paradise” takes on the abstract weightiness of an ethical debate rather than the visceral urgency of a thriller. Though the clock ticks relentlessly enough to sustain the story’s tension, the film finally seems to be a character study in search of a gripping plot.
Mr. Ruben has assembled a fine cast down to the secondary characters (Vera Farmiga briefly rivets attention as Tony’s savvy fiancee) and has given the film a haunting exoticism, especially in its richly detailed Asian scenes. Like ”Red Corner,” it devotes considerable attention to the courtroom manners and unforgiving judicial code in an Asian country. One curious footnote: the hellish Malaysian jail that is seen here (and was also a setting for ”12 Monkeys”) is actually a derelict penitentiary in Philadelphia. Lewis’s prison cell is modeled on the real one that housed Al Capone.
Return to Paradise (1998)
Directed by: Joseph Ruben
Starring: Vince Vaughn, Anne Heche, Joaquin Phoenix, David Conrad, Jada Pinkett Smith, Joel de la Fuente, Richard Chang, Deanna Yusoff, Brette Taylor, Amy Wong
Screenplay by: Wesley Strick, Bruce Robinson
Production Design by: Bill Groom
Cinematography by: Reynaldo Villalobos
Film Editing by: Craig McKay, Andrew Mondshein
Costume Design by: Juliet Polcsa
Set Decoration by: Frank Grasso, Betsy Klompus
Art Direction by: Dennis Bradford
Music by: Mark Mancina
MPAA Rating: R for language, drug content, some sexuality and a scene of violence.
Distributed by: Universal Pictures, Gramercy Pictures
Release Date: August 14, 1998
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