“Return to Paradise” brings up a moral dilemma that, hopefully, no person will ever have to struggle with.

But the dilemma is real enough that someone could be faced with it in our insanely unequal world, and because of this, the audience walks away from the movie wondering “What would I have done?”

Sheriff (Vince Vaugn), Tony (David Conrad) and Lewis (Joaquin Phoenix), who are all just a few years older than the average Iowa State student, spend a wild vacation together in Malaysia.

The men live the “good life” in a country where their Yankee status brings them cheap rum, beautiful women and more hashish than they could ever want.

Sheriff and Tony return to New York and their future careers as a limo driver and an architect, respectively.

Lewis, the big-hearted Peace Corps worker, stays in Malaysia until he can travel to join up with an effort to save the orangutans.

The movie then fast-forwards two years in the future.

What was supposed to be an ordinary limo pick-up for Sheriff becomes a life-altering event when his customer Beth (Ann Heche), a lawyer who just returned from Malaysia, tells Sheriff that Lewis was arrested the very day Sheriff left Malaysia.

Lewis was charged with drug trafficking, since the police found more than the amount of hashish required to meet the legal definition of a trafficker in the hut the men shared.

Even scarier, Lewis has spent the last two years in a Malaysian prison, and he is sentenced to die for his “crime.” Drug trafficking is a capital offense in Malaysia.

For Lewis to avoid the death penalty, Beth has worked out a deal that requires Sheriff and Tony to return to Malaysia and plead guilty to drug possession.

If both men return, they will spend three years in prison for their confession. If only one returns, that person must stay in prison for six years in order to save Lewis’s life.

Either option would mean they would lose a large portion of their lives in a crowded third-world prison just to save a man they barely know. They have eight days to decide, or Lewis will die.

The situation is a pure test of what each man considers to be the right choice, and the performances of Vaugn and Heche bring this aching struggle to life.

In particular, Vaugn, who stole every scene in his previous movie “Swingers,” played the everyday guy perfectly. Sheriff was definitely not a hero.

In fact, he wasn’t even that nice of a guy. However, Sheriff does have an opportunity to turn his life around for the better, but what a decision he must make in order to change.

“Return to Paradise” is not a movie with a lot of action or scenery. Audiences should be prepared to hear some thought-provoking conversations and the pleas of a man reaching out for his last chance at life.

“I don’t think I would do it for you,” Lewis admits to Sheriff. The real question that remains is: Would anyone?

3 1/2 stars out of five

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Teresa Halvorsen is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Northwood.