Paradise City

Very poor acting from the main characters. Should have just concentrated Bruce Willis and John Travolta instead of the rest of the amateur cast. The plot is not believable, neither are the 'natives'. The rest of the cast are totally unconvincing. The words came out alright but their lack of connection with their facial expressions and body language is laughable. Bad guys, aside from Travolta, are about as menacing as NOT!! Just because you are carrying an automatic weapon and say a few F-words, does not make a convincing thug. There's no humour, no excitement and the plot is extremely predictable. Enough said of a non-event.

Actually, I wasn't really harboring much of any grand expectations for the 2022 action thriller "Paradise City" from director Chuck Russell. Not that it is based on the director or anything, but the numerous movies these last couple of years coming from Bruce Willis just haven't been top notch stellar movies, if you know what I mean.

But still, I had the opportunity to watch "Paradise City", and I do believe in giving a movie a fair chance. So of course I opted to sit down and watch this movie without ever having heard about it.

The storyline in "Paradise City", as written by Edward Drake, Corey Large and Chuck Russell, was pretty simplistic. I mean, you could leave the movie for an extended period of time to go do something else and return only to find that you were not missing out on anything. Well, at least that makes "Paradise City" a very easy movie to watch, as it requires zero invenstment of attention from the viewers.

The movie does have some familiar faces on the cast list, with the likes of Bruce Willis, John Travolta, Stephen Dorff, Noel Gugliemi and Branscombe Richmond. However, I can't really claim that I witnessed any particularly memorable or outstanding performances as the movie trotted on.

Was I entertained by "Paradise City"? Hardly. Yet, I actually still managed to sit through all 92 minutes of it. However, once the movie came to an end, I must admit that I was left with an overwhelming sense of 'was that it?' and a feeling of having wasted 92 minutes on nothing.

If you enjoy action thrillers, then there are far, far better movies readily available out there. And "Paradise City" came and went without leaving any kind of impression. So this was just another dubious movie in a long line of dubious movies starring Bruce Willis.

My rating of "Paradise City" lands on a three out of ten stars.

It feels like John Travolta & Bruce Willis vacationed in Hawaii and ran into Stephen Dorff and someone lost a bet... and this movie was made the following week before they all flew back home.

I seriously can't believe this movie was made with these stars. Sad.

There were scenes where it felt the actors (if they could be called that) were reading the lines for the first time. No suspense, no character development, poor timing...

Did the female "actress" just get lip fillers the day of shooting, maybe that's why the acting was so poor? I'm looking for reasonable explanations as to justify what prevented her from trying to act... It felt like she has no experience but paid her way to be on the set with some movie stars for fun... she wasn't even trying.

At least they had some fun in a beautiful location :)

First of all its total waste of talented and reputed casting.

The movie lacks all the basics it takes to make a good film. The plot, writing and direction all were lacking to make it a movie worth watching. There's no suspense to keep the audiences on their seats till the last.

Talking about story it seems good to me but with some improvements it would have been wonderful. Same goes for the writing, the ending seemed so blunt, like it was just a cold good bye.

While Bruce Willis and John Travolta give justice to their roles while some of the cast were not up to the mark.

To sum it up it's average which lacks the potential.

Really a cheese ball of a movie Minus the Hawaiian scenery, cinematography and native/cultural inclusions it's absolute cheese.

Travolta, Dorff and Willis were pretty much true to form film stars, but less than stellar performance from anywhere else.

The plot is absolutely predictable and you've seen it a thousand times before. It has the feel of "throw this together quickly and enjoy our time on the islands". The action scenes were fairly unrealistic for the most part.

I almost just turned it off about 20 minutes in, but decided to weather through it.

That being said, I did enjoy all the Hawaiian aspects of it.