“Paradise City” is a semi-under-the-radar junk crime thriller, but when a movie like this one stars actors like John Travolta, Bruce Willis, and Stephen Dorff it can sometimes mean two things: that the stars are slumming, but that you’ll have fun watching them.
The same movie made with grade-z actors wouldn’t have the same frisson.
(It would be a pain to sit through.) Chuck Russell, the director of “Paradise City,” is actually a semi-a-list veteran whose credits include “The Mask,” “The Scorpion King,” “Eraser,” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” (which some of us thought of as a rare ’80s slasher-movie standout).
Who would have imagined that those credits, in the sage of Netflix, would now make Russell sound like some sort of low-grade genre renaissance man? In “Paradise City,” an underworld drama set on Maui, Russell knows that he’s making a grubby piece of product,
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