Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #72 Club Paradise (1986)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

A good way to have your Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 selection bumped to the top of the list, beyond “bribing” me with “cocaine” and “uncut diamonds” of course (oh wait, that wasn’t subtle or winking at all) is to choose something that I have been wanting to see all my life but for no good reason whatsoever just never got around to. 

That certainly describes 1986’s Club Paradise, a movie I somehow have made it forty-three years without seeing or writing about despite it being co-written and directed by the auspicious team of Harold Ramis and our old pal Brian Doyle-Murray, who previously collaborated on the script for a little movie called Caddyshack, directed by Ramis and boasting a once-in-a-lifetime ensemble that combines pretty much the entire SCTV cast minus John Candy and Catherine O’Hara plus Robin Williams, Jimmy Cliff and Peter O’Toole. 

How can a movie like that fail? How can anything with Rick Moranis, Eugene Levy, Robin Williams, Andrea Martin, Peter O’Toole, Jimmy Cliff, Robin Williams and Brian Doyle-Murray, all operating under the masterful eye of comedy guru Harold Ramis in a colorful island setting not be, at the very least, intermittently awesome? How can a movie whose premise is essentially “SCTV goes to the islands, and a major motion picture studio pays for it” fail? 

Club Paradise doesn’t even have a bad reputation so much as a non-reputation. People simply don’t talk about it a whole lot, which is surprising given the talent involved. It has been largely forgotten, which makes perfect sense considerable how utterly, maddeningly forgettable it is. 

There are many, many problems with Club Paradise, which began the development process in 1980 but wouldn’t hit theaters until over a half decade later. The biggest problem, the fatal flaw, is that Club Paradise was written not just as a Bill Murray vehicle but conceived as a Bill Murray movie, a tiny, tidy but lucrative micro-genre of the late 1970s and 1980s about a sly, sarcastic slacker and inveterate spiritual anarchist who leads a waggish tongue-in-cheek revolt against corrupt authority when not dispensing sarcastic one-liners, charming the pants off the female lead and ad-libbing up a storm. 

Murray signed on to star in Club Paradise as a retired, burnt out Chicago fireman whose lust for life is renewed when he moves to a fictional Caribbean island and ends up playing a central role in the conflict between the corrupt local government and the principled reggae artist he co-owns a rundown resort with. 

That’s not surprising considering the script was co-written by his brother and his Meatballs, Stripes, Caddyshack and Ghostbusters writer Ramis and directed by Ramis. Murray being Murray he decided that he he was going to take a six month break from film rather than star in Club Paradise so his part was recast with another comedy superstar and gifted improviser with a decidedly different persona and sensibility. 

The problem is that they made a Bill Murray movie a Robin Williams movie without seemingly re-tooling it at all for his very different skillset. Williams is uncharacteristically subdued as a white man in paradise suddenly confronted with all manner of crazy variables he couldn’t have even contemplated mere months earlier, when he was a bitter firefighter in Chicago. 

It turns out that asking Robin Williams to reign it way in can actually work against a comedy that could benefit from a massive influx of the coke-fueled energy that fueled his most manic performances in the 1980s. Williams isn’t doing his frenetic Robin Williams shtick here but he’s also not acting, something he was quite good at. 

Williams is stuck playing a glum simulacrum of Bill Murray, all reflexive sarcasm, glib insults and lazy “attitude.” We begin in Chicago in the middle of brutal, brutal winter, with Jack Moniker (Williams) grousing about how much he hates the bitter Midwestern cold and his dangerous job before an accident earns him a healthy disability settlement he uses to move to the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Nicholas. 

When we next see Jack he has been living in the islands for six months, palling around with club owner, reggae artist and fiery political activist Ernest Reed (Jimmy Cliff) and exchanging tart words with Anthony Croyden Hayes (Peter O’Toole), who the Queen has appointed the governor of St. Nicholas despite his clear-cut disinterest in doing anything beyond pursuing his vices. 

O’Toole plays the debauched libertine as an erudite snob who delights in his superiority to everyone around him, particularly Jack, the proverbial “slob” to his “snob.” When the governor sneeringly inquires as to Jack’s profession, he squeezes vast universes of contempt and acidic condescension into the mocking phrases, “dry cleaning business”, “Hat blocking” and "Xerox repair”, as if a mind as advanced and continental as his own can barely even comprehend such punishingly banal occupations. 

O’Toole was nominated for a Golden Raspberry for his performance here, which is some straight up bullshit. People who do fine work in bad movies, the way O’Toole does here, should be singled out for praise and acclaim, not lazily attacked because of they possess the most famous name connected to a notorious flop. 

Now I could tell you what happens in Club Paradise, as if it fucking mattered at all but I don’t think I can improve on the pithy succinctness of the description on Wikipedia: The movie follows a group of vacationers staying at the newly opened Club Paradise as a series of increasingly unlikely events takes place.

That’s actually not fair because not only does Club Paradise have a plot, it has way too much plot. Like the teen rec center in a poor but proud neighborhood in a breakdancing movie, Saint Nicholas faces an awful threat in the form of evil rich people who want to buy everything up so that it can tear down what’s honest and indigenous and proud for the sake of creating high rise condominiums and parking lots and shopping malls and all the other horrifying signifiers of “progress.” 

The only thing standing in their way is Ernest’s scruffy, underdog club, which is in danger of being shut down for unpaid taxes before “Island” Jack decides to get his white savior on and save this proud black man from personal, professional and economic ruin by acting as an angel investor and co-owner of his ramshackle resort Club Paradise. 

Doyle-Murray is unsurprisingly the best part of the film in his quietly scene-stealing role as mustachioed, Machiavellian businessman Voit Zerbe. 

Doyle-Murray alone nails the tone the film is going for but otherwise never attains, playing a hilariously pragmatic opportunist who sees the political machinations of Saint Nicholas exclusively through the prism of his own oily self-interest. 

Club Paradise only feels like a proper satire of colonialism and unhinged capitalism when Doyle-Murray is center stage as an actor and writer, like when he’s telling Ernest, who is auditioning for a job performing at his upscale club, that he’ll have to play crowd-pleasing, feel-good reggae rather than angry, personal, political music, reasoning sanely, “A man who just paid 32 dollars for a bad Veal Oscar doesn’t want to know that the band is angry.” 

That line says more, more incisively about black rage and white capitalism than the rest of the film does in its entirety. 

As is his nature, Doyle-Murray, one of many cast and crew members with SCTV on their resume, makes so many weird, interesting, specific choices, whether he’s gushing about a lobster “the size of a child or a small woman” or framing the stakes of sustained violent unrest as the fate of the “150 pounds of lobster melting in my freezer”, and executes them with such sublime understatement that his scenes stand out and are memorable even though the movie itself is screamingly forgettable. 

Making a sloppy, slobs versus snobs comedy in the Caribbean put the filmmakers in an impossible position. If they don’t acknowledge racism and colonialism and the economic exploitation of developing countries by the United States then they look cowardly and safe, like they’re afraid to confront anything potentially alienating or off-putting. But if they attempt to wrestle with these issues without giving them sufficient weight and gravity then they seem tasteless and over their head. 

Club Paradise has no weight, gravity or substance, let alone enough to tackle the serious issues at its core. It seems fundamentally confused as to what kind of movie it wants to be. Is it a dark, scathing National Lampoon-style take on economic imperialism or a slobs versus snobs apolitical lowbrow romp? 

Club Paradise seems pretty certain it’s a Bill Murray movie, but his absence and Williams presence in the lead role suggests otherwise. Strongly. So Club Paradise is partially an underwhelming and confused political comedy where a Caribbean nation is saved largely by a retired slacker from Chicago and an elegant British man on a horse and partially a wacky sex and drug comedy that gave the SCTV cast a paid vacation but at a terrible cost. 

Eugene Levy and Rick Moranis are two of the funniest human beings in the world but I mostly just felt embarrassed for them as they fulfill a character arc more befitting Eddie Deezen in a sex comedy. They’re a pair of incorrigible horndogs, colleagues in the smoked meats business, who really want to get laid but in order to impress the beauties in their orbit they need to score some of that sweet, sweet ganja first. 

Judging by Cliff’s perpetually bloodshot eyes, it seems clear that he has the hook up, but instead these two comic geniuses spend pretty much the entire film crudely chasing babes or marijuana; it’s not an encouraging sign that Levy’s big scene involves him finding a comically oversized bag of weed that of course looks more like hay than the devil’s lettuce. 

Club Paradise badly wants to be an R rated Bill Murray comedy that does for Club Med what Stripes did for the military and Ghostbusters did for ghost-busting. Instead it settles for just being bad. 

Here’s the thing about Harold Ramis. He's written, or rather co-written, in Caddyshack, Meatballs, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Back to School and Groundhog Day movies that defined the comic sensibility of whole generations. He’s given awful men movies to quote from endlessly in lieu of possessing actual personalities. 

In Groundhog Day Ramis made one of the only perfect movies ever made, a solid contender for greatest comedy of all time. But when he whiffs, hoo boy does he ever whiff. His filmography is positively studded with movies that simply do not work, that are devoid of laughs, that feel like wastes of everyone’s time: the cast, the crew, the audience, critics. 

Some of these movies have risen unfairly to the rank of modern “classic”, like 1983’s sour and misanthropic Vacation but most were correctly received as total or near-total failures: this, of course, 1996’s muddled Multiplicity, 2000’s Bedazzled, 2002’s Analyze That and finally 2009’s Year One, which ended Ramis’ auspicious career on a grotesquely scatological low. 

Sometimes a comedy just doesn’t fucking work and you’re left with a dud that just lays there, inert, lifeless, confused. That’s Club Paradise. It does nothing to counter the widely held notion that great movies are not made in paradise because the cast and crew are in vacation rather than work mode.

Club Paradise’s cast, director and screenwriters all promise greatness, hilarity or both but this profoundly underwhelming motion picture fails to rise even to the level of affable mediocrity.

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