On paper, Club Paradise should have worked like gangbusters. Directed by Harold Ramis, it’s filled with comedy legends like Robin Williams, Rick Moranis, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Joe Flaherty, and Brian Doyle-Murray. It also has reggae superstar, Jimmy Cliff, screen icon, Peter O’Toole, Joanna Cassidy, Carey Lowell, and Twiggy.
It’s a fun cast, a perfunctory story, and once again includes that all-time evil, greedy land developers. It also has a fairly solid reggae packed soundtrack.
The opening of the film almost makes you think everything that happens after an explosion could be Jack Moniker’s (Williams) after life. He’s a firefighter (working with Bruce McGill!) who has had enough, and the explosion forces him into retirement. So he decides to take his life to the tropics and relax.
There he meets Ernest Reed (Cliff) who runs a local club. When the club is menaced by Zerbe (Brian Doyle-Murray) and Prime Minister Gundy (Adolph Caesar), the club has the best beach on the island, and there are plans for it, Reed and Jack convert it to a resort in an attempt to save it.
Guests arrive and wackiness ensues, but none of it actually works as well as it should.
There’s no real chemistry between Williams and Cliff, which is too bad because they are supposed to be best friends, and eventually business partners. So that doesn’t help the plot. Williams is never given the chance to really cut loose, and that’s another loss, it’s a quieter almost restrained performance, and it doesn’t work in a comedy.
The pairing of Eugene Levy and Rick Moranis is smart, but it doesn’t pay off as well as it should. They’re trying to score ladies and some smoke, but neither is as funny as it could be.
The locations are beautiful, the music is great, but the film never quite realizes its comic potential. The only moments that really shine are a number that belong to Andrea Martin. She goes all in.
The whole thing feels like a misfire. It had all the parts, a great director, solid cast, superior locations, and those tunes! But the story and the performances never quite mesh and hit their mark. It’s not laid back enough to be an island story, and it’s not cohesive enough to captivate with a narrative. It’s a series of not quite funny enough gags and jokes that probably sounded great initially, but just didn’t quite make it to the screen.
