This cheerfully comic Christmas crime caper about brotherhood and redemption probably looked like a safe bet.
For the uninitiated, three brothers, one trying to go straight and two freshly paroled, rob a small-town Pennsylvania bank on Christmas Eve and then can’t escape because a snowstorm keeps stranding them in the very community they just robbed. The twist is that the townspeople of Paradise are so relentlessly kind, so trusting, so full of holiday spirit, that the brothers start to feel genuinely terrible about what they’ve done.
The big joke is that these three guys have spent their whole lives navigating a world where everyone’s got an angle, and suddenly they’re stuck somewhere that runs on pure Capra-esque sincerity. Their cynicism has no purchase here. It’s a comedy about criminals slowly being disarmed by decency.
Critics at the time were not so nice. Roger Ebert suggested the Library of Congress preserve it as “an example of creative desperation.” The cast reportedly got minimal direction by George Gallo, Jon Lovitz later said the director told them to do whatever they wanted, which explains what Carvey is doing, and Cage ended up directing some scenes himself. You can feel that looseness in the finished product, for better and worse.
Apparently, 20th Century Fox execs flew from LA to Canada to tell Carvey to stop doing the voice. But Nicolas Cage encouraged him to keep doing it.
What happened between “safe bet” and “creative desperation” is harder to pin down. Maybe Gallo stepping back and letting the cast improvise worked against the material. Maybe the tonal balance between 90s crime comedy and old-Hollywood sentiment never quite gelled.
But thirty years later, the critical pile-on feels like ancient history.
A Christmas Movie’s a Christmas movie, and many of our beloved classics were originally bombs or panned by critics – so a film being “good” for goodness’ sake, well, that shouldn’t be much of an issue. Especially when you look at the piles of Hallmark rom-coms or the Tim Allen detritus or that gets shoveled every year.
Is it good? I think it’s good where it counts, and it’s earned a spot on the shelf somewhere between The Ref and Home Alone 2.
I’ll happily spend some time in Paradise every year. -Pop
Trapped in Paradise arrived on Home Video today in 1995, after a November 21st, 1994 theatrical release.