Don't let the name fool you — "Another Day in Paradise" isn't.
On paper, a big-screen adaptation of Eddie Little's cult novel must have sounded like a good idea. But after the casting of James Woods in a major role, almost everything else went wrong with this depressing, downbeat crime and drug-culture drama.
Though Woods' performance is very good, other prominent roles go to the always irritating Melanie Griffith and Natasha Gregson Wagner. And it certainly doesn't help that the movie is directed by infamous "Kids" filmmaker Larry Clark.
What Clark obviously thought was pull-no-punches filmmaking is instead lurid and exploitative. The film features graphic scenes of drug use — as well as one of the highest profanity counts in recent cinematic history.
The action is set in the 1970s Midwest and follows two petty crooks, Bobby (Vincent Kartheiser, from "Alaska"), and his girlfriend, Rosie (Wagner). When one of their small-time heists goes wrong — he is brutally beaten by a security guard — the two are forced to look for help.
What they find are surrogate parents in the persons of Mel (Woods) and Sid (Griffith), a pair of experienced (and drug-addicted) hoods who take them under their wing and who decide to include the teens in a planned crime spree.
And though the younger couple actually thrives in this "nurturing" environment, tensions rise when Mel's true personality emerges — as the result of a drug deal gone disastrously bad.
Clark's direction is grating, as is the irritating use of pseudo-documentary photography (including glaring closeups and "shaky cam" work), which does nothing to enhance the film. Instead, it makes the already repellent material that much harder to watch.
On the performance side, Woods is fine, even though his character is broadly written. And Kartheiser does a decent job of trying to shake his good-guy image (from performances in the youth movies "Masterminds" and "Alaska").
But Griffith's squeaky voice makes some of her lines sound laughable, and Wagner is so wooden that even a cardboard cutout could have done better.
"Another Day in Paradise" is rated R for excessive, nearly constant profanity, violent beatings and gunplay, graphic simulated drug use (heroin), simulated sex, graphic gore, female nudity and male partial nudity, use of vulgar sexual slang and racial epithets.