1994's Trapped in Paradise Represents the Nadir of Nicolas Cage's Normie 1990s Phase
#Deadringers
The 1994 Christmas comedy Trapped in Paradise is a movie I have put off seeing for over a quarter century despite my enormous fondness for Nicolas Cage, Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey.
Why haven’t I seen Trapped in Paradise? The most obvious answer is because it was a critically reviled flop with no cult following whatsoever that seemingly no one likes, including its stars.
But when has that ever stopped me? Besides, Trapped in Paradise didn’t just star beloved Saturday Night Live funnymen and personal favorites Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey during that tiny window where it seemed possible, if not particularly likely, that people would pay good money to see them star in movies as well as the almost always awesome Nicolas Cage: it also had a terrific premise in three misfit criminal brothers robbing a bank on Christmas Eve, then being stuck in the impossibly idyllic small town where it all went down by the kindness and compassion of townsfolk full of Christmas spirit the way Charlie Sheen was full of cocaine during the 1980s.
If you’re wondering just how a movie with so much promise could go so completely awry, a good indication can be found in an IMDB trivia entry that asserts, unsurprisingly, “According to Jon Lovitz, director George Gallo did not actually direct much and told the cast to do whatever they wanted. According to Lovitz, Nicolas Cage actually directed some of the film because Gallo refused to give direction.”
It’s not just that first-time director Gallo didn’t give direction but rather that he refused to do so, seemingly on principle.
This makes me think a documentary about the making of Trapped in Paradise would be more entertaining than the film itself, though that’s setting the bar impossibly low.
I love the idea of the stars of Trapped in Paradise desperately seeking direction from their director on how to play any given scene, only to be told, “Hey, you do you! Say the lines in the script and try to hit your marks or don’t! It’s not my job, as the director, to tell you what to do!”
I suspect Cage would give similar non-direction, but much louder and angrier and with a crazed gleam in his eyes. “Doowutchyalike” was a terrific title and conceit for a Digital Underground song but it’s not good direction for a movie.
Trapped in Paradise is one of those rancid Yuletide laffers that aspire to be naughty but nice but end up being shticky but sentimental.
Trapped in Paradise unsurprisingly suffers from a fatal lack of direction, literally and figuratively. A stronger director, for example, would have vetoed Carvey’s idea of basing his kleptomaniac lowlife’s voice on Rumble Fish-era Mickey Rourke.
Of course, when you imitate a young Mickey Rourke you’re also, by definition, impersonating Marlon Brando the same way you’d be imitating Jack Nicholson if you did Christian Slater.
There is a certain logic to Carvey’s strong, bad choice. After all, in their radiant, impossibly beautiful youths, Rourke and Brando cultivated personas as sensitive brutes, thugs with deep, soulful inner lives.
As an idea, playing a young Mickey Rourke as one of the Three Stooges radiates promise and potential. Onscreen it dies a painful death, the lurches about, zombie-like for 112 interminable minutes.
112 minutes! This rancid cinematic fruitcake is nearly two hours long when there is a not a reason on earth it has to be longer than 85 minutes beyond it having a lot of bullshit subplots to get through.
A clearly embarrassed Nicolas Cage, ending his weird early to mid 1990s stint as a mainstream, major studio jokester on a grim nadir, stars as Bill Firpo, the most responsible and adult of three criminal brothers.
Like his equally one-note siblings, criminality is in Bill’s blood. Crime isn’t something he does; it’s who he is, no matter how desperately he wants to go straight, for the sake of his immortal soul as well as his freedom.
So Bill is mortified to discover that his ne’er do well brothers Alvin (Carvey) and Dave (Lovitz) are being released from prison due to over-crowding. In a real departure from signature bits like Tommy Flanagan, the funny and oddly endearing Compulsive Liar Lovitz memorably played to great gales of laughter on Saturday Night Live, Lovitz here plays an almost impressively forgettable compulsive liar who isn’t funny or endearing in the least.
Lovitz lies. Carvey steals. Cage rages. They’ve each been allocated exactly one shrill note to repeat endlessly. They’re never convincing, individually or as brothers, but then no element of this holiday hokum convinces.
Bill is not at all happy about his brother’s freedom and their ability to compromise his own but he feels a sense of responsibility towards them all the same, out of Catholic guilt but also because there would be no movie if he didn’t.
The exasperated sibling’s fears prove well founded. Alvin and Dave’s inability to refrain from criminality is only matched by their complete and total disinterest in pursuing a straight life. They commit crimes as reflexively and naturally as breathing. They can’t help it. It’s who they are and who Bill is as well, as much as he tries to fight it.
The boys’ mother, whose gag is that she is an elderly lady who curses like a sailor despite being of the fairer sex and a mother several times over, and consequently someone who would undoubtedly refrain from using gutter language in a non-comedy, encourages the boys to keep up the life of crime as long as it provides her with a steady stream of purloined electronic supplies.
Inveterate schemer Dave tricks Bill into accompanying him and his brother to Paradise, Pennsylvania, ostensibly to do a favor for an inmate he and his brother did time with but really they’re interested in a bank so badly guarded that it’s practically begging to be robbed.
Bill’s criminal instincts won’t let him pass up such a once in a lifetime opportunity, even as he realizes better than anyone just how woefully deficient his brothers are as both criminals and human beings.
There is a special place in movie hell for directors who make movies where robberies occupy a place of central importance yet see heists as something unimportant to rush through instead of respecting the craft, care and meticulousness that goes into both a great heist and a great heist sequence. That’s Trapped in Paradise.
Trapped in Paradise is in a dreadful hurry to get to the aftermath of the heist, when the Firpos’ efforts to escape the punishingly perfect hamlet with their ill-gotten loot are thwarted by the kindness and generosity of the townspeople who never suspect anything less than charitable about outsiders who couldn’t be any more suspicious if they all had neck tattoos reading “CAREER CRIMINAL” and “I JUST ROBBED A BANK.”
Meanwhile, in subplots pleading desperately for the cutting room floor, the inmate who told Alvin and Dave about the bank in Paradise break out of prison and, with some escaped convict accomplices, kidnaps the brothers’ mom en route to confronting the Firpos in Paradise and an FBI agent played by the great Richard Jenkins flies in to survey the scene.
Trapped in Paradise is equally inept at tickling funny bones and plucking at heartstrings. It makes a big, predictable turn towards maudlin, sticky sentimentality once it is established that Paradise is a Norman Rockwell fantasy where everyone not only smiles at you but shoves a 100 dollar bill in your palm because what is Christmas if not an opportunity to give presents to sweaty, unpleasant, suspicious-seeming strangers?
Throughout this endless, shapeless boondoggle Cage sports an expression of exasperation and defeat that seems to belong to the actor as much, if not more, to the character. Cage is defeated. He’s frustrated. He’s all too cognizant that he’s in a lost cause no amount of energy or intensity or wildcard charisma can save.
In the very near future Nicolas Cage would become, in quick succession, an Academy Award-winning thespian and one of the biggest movie stars in the world. He’d be too big and too good to waste his time in nonsense like this but that was seemingly true in 1994 as well, when Cage had proved himself as an unusually intense, unusually charismatic actor over and over again, if not quite as a bankable box-office attraction.
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