Another Day In Paradise

By Richard Corliss Monday, Jan. 25, 1999
    • If the hard-drugs crowd--Generation H--needed a bard, Clark would be the guy. His Kids was a glum screed about teens, drugs and unsafe sex. At least in Paradise, from a novel by ex-con Eddie Little, the lowlifes have some fun shooting up and stealing. Here two career criminals (James Woods and Melanie Griffith) adopt a young couple (Vincent Kartheiser and Natasha Gregson Wagner) into la dolce venom. There's a droll tough love in this inversion of Father Knows Best, where Dad is given to arias of rage, Mom kills people, Bud and Princess do junk. The tone is naturalism run amuck: two-ton emoting, closeups of syringes in groins. Enough! But it's fun to see a scene stealer like Woods go bananas. Here he goes a bunch of them.