‘Return To Paradise’ An Absorbing Puzzle That Never Gets Solved

Vince Vaughn must be a great co-worker.

The actor, who shot to fame in “Swingers,” co-stars with Joaquin Phoenix and Anne Heche in “Return to Paradise,” and he has already made another movie with each of them (“Clay Pigeons,” with Phoenix, is due this fall; the remake of “Psycho,” in which he dices up Heche, this Christmas). Or maybe it’s just that the actors wanted another shot at getting it right, having failed with “Return to Paradise.”

It’s a shame, too. On the rare occasions when Hollywood deals with a serious subject, you want it to be good. “Return to Paradise” focuses on an attorney (Heche) with an impossible job: Her client (Phoenix, whose part consists of keening and sweating) is imprisoned in Malaysia, awaiting execution for hashish possession.

To save him from death, she must persuade two of his casual friends (Vaughn and David Conrad) to return to Malaysia and shoulder part of the punishment burden.

For its first half, “Return to Paradise” is an absorbing puzzle. As Heche tries to persuade the skeptical Vaughn and Conrad to go to the slammer, we ponder what we’d do. Would you be willing to spend years in an Asian hellhole to save someone you knew for only five weeks but whose predicament is partly your responsibility?

It’s a fascinating question that suggests all sorts of other questions about friendship, even if you’re not the sort of person who’s likely to get busted for scoring hash in a foreign country.

But the answers are not as compelling as the questions. Since it is entirely about what sort of people these characters are, it’s important that we understand their motivations, but we don’t. The Vaughn character remains a mystery even as he becomes the focus of Heche’s efforts, because we’re missing a scene that would tell us who he was before he learned of the drug bust.

There’s also a randomness to the action of the movie, in which the plot moves the characters, instead of the other way around.

That results in a romantic subplot so incongruous that you begin to think the screenwriter may have indulged in a little hashish himself.

“Return to Paradise” Location: Lyons Credits: Directed by Joseph Ruben, starring Anne Heche, Vince Vaughn, Joaquin Phoenix Running time: 1:49 Rating: R