Paradise Lost

Club Paradise

At the Charles

Directed by Harold Ramis

SOMETHING IS ROTTEN on the island of St. Nicholas and it's not the smell of oil-covered flesh frying in the tropical sun. It's not even the evil machinations of several fatcats planning on buying these unspoiled Caribbean beaches to build their dream highrise resort. What's rotten here is the acting, script and theme all mixed up in a noxious concoction of a movie.

Club Paradise, which stars the normally hilarious Robin Williams, may be one of the summer's worsts. Clearly designed to make a few bucks off of those whose heads are affected by the solar rays and want to watch a fantasy of surf, sex and sun but as a B-Movie fantasy this film doesn't even work. Instead what we get is a slightly moralizing, very patronizing and almost racist story about life among the island resort set.

The plot is painfully simple. A Chicago fireman named Jack Moniker (Williams), who is tired of the hustle and bustle of the big city, retires to a secluded island shack on Nicholas. If we were to believe this movie, along with the recently released Running Scared about Chicago cops, it would seem every public servant of the windy city is looking to find some sun.

When he comes to the island, Jack befriends the locals and patronizes their hangout, a reggae bar, owned by a free spirit named Ernest. It just so happens that Ernest's bar also has the best beachfront on the island. And Ernest won't sell to the evil businessmen who want to spoil the island to satisfy their capitalist dream.

Well, thank God that our hero fireman decided to retire to Nicholas, because without him Ernest probably wouldn't have been able to fight off the bad guys. They rebuild the bar and turn it into a resort called Club Paradise, where wacky things happen to our cast of journeyman comedians and comediennes. This includes almost the entire cast of the recently pathetically unfunny Saturday Night Live.

We also get Peter O'Toole, who as the Island's British Governor, manages to prostitute a little more of his so frightfully English charm for another movie contract.

But in the end what we get here are a series of unfunny slapstick scenes and running jokes which leave the viewer with a frozen smile on his face. The only really funny shtick has been shown on television commercials so many times that it loses its value.

The other jokes are haggard, forced and stupid. Jokes about nerdy guys trying to get marijuana went out with the polyester leisure suit. And chuckles about working women who are incurably shy of men ended after Dinah Shore finally got Cary Grant to marry her on the silver screen.

Indeed with the incredibly typecast actors, there are enough stereotypes in this movie to fill up a Tweeter audio store.

And of course the movie manages to offend all our senses with enough ethnic humor to give Jesse Helms a shiver up his spine. We get to see the fat, rich sheik. The incompetent and Uncle Tom-like Black prime minister as well as the Island's yellow belly fighting force make a showing. Oh, and I don't want to forget the two Barrys from Long Island and Miami Beach.

Williams, who traditionally is a progressive comic, should be ashamed at his participation in this backwater film just to make a few bucks. Don't give into the draw of his big name by spending your hard-earned five dollars.