MOVIE REVIEW : Holiday Comedy Gets Caught in That ‘Trapped’ Feeling

“Trapped in Paradise” may well be the worst Christmas movie since 1964’s “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”--that’s the one in which Pia Zadora played a Martian child. It holds its audience hostage for an unconscionable 111 minutes with a rambling, unfunny, thickly sentimental comedy that plays like third-rate Frank Capra.

As bad as it is, it’s understandable that players of the caliber of Nicolas Cage, Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey became involved because by and large their parts are well-written and because at the film’s core is a viable idea: a trio of inept bank robbers find themselves stuck on a snowy Christmas Eve in a Norman Rockwell/Grandma Moses village called Paradise, Pa., where most everybody is so darn nice that these bad guys find themselves swamped by sheer goodness.

Unfortunately, writer-director George Gallo allows his essentially simple story to wander quite literally all over the countryside, piling it on with needless digressions and failing to make any of them more than faintly amusing. As it is, it takes him an interminable 45 minutes for his premise to kick in, and that’s when the three brothers Firpo find themselves inadvertently sitting down to Christmas dinner with the family of the saintly president (Donald Moffat) of the local bank they’ve just knocked over.

Typically, just as this sequence starts building amusingly, Gallo yanks the Firpos away from the table and sends them on their wanderings.

The taut structure and crisp writing and direction needed to get away with such old-fashioned holiday uplift is precisely what’s lacking. Robert Folk’s heart-tugging score also detracts, giving the film the glazed quality of a candied apple.

The stars themselves are fine--Cage as the smartest, most-conflicted of the brothers, a classic good-bad guy; Lovitz as a crass, cynical compulsive liar, and Carvey as a goofy, high-voiced kleptomaniac--but the movie is too much a mess for their considerable presence to redeem it.

* MPAA rating: PG-13 for some rude language. Times guidelines: The strong language is considerable, and although appropriate to the characters, may offend those looking for holiday family entertainment .

‘Trapped in Paradise’

Nicolas Cage: Bill Firpo

Jon Lovitz: Dave Firpo

Dana Carvey: Alvin Firpo

Madchen Amick: Sarah Collins

A 20th Century Fox presentation. Writer-director George Gallo. Producers Jon Davison, George Gallo. Executive producer David Permut. Cinematographer Jack N. Green. Editor Terry Rawlings. Costumes Mary E. McLeod. Music Robert Folk. Production designer Bob Ziembecki. Art director Gregory P. Keen. Set decorator Gord Sim. Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.