The Pitch: David (George Clooney) and Georgia (Julia Roberts) are two hugely successful, extremely divorced people, with 19 years of bitter animus between them. In fact, the only times they even see each other are for the major milestones in the life of their daughter, Lily (Kaitlin Dever), and even then they can’t help but snipe at each other through forced smiles.
But they’re forced back into each other’s orbits when Lily shacks up with a handsome seaweed farmer (model Maxime Bouttier) on her post-graduation trip to Bali, and invites them to her whirlwind wedding on the Indonesian island paradise. Recognizing that throwing her career away for idle island living and a guy she’s just met is a Bad Idea, the two plot to sabotage the wedding from the inside. Along the way, though, they may just interrogate whether their own doomed marriage was such a mistake after all.
Wrong Place, Wrong Time, Wrong Circumstance: There’s a clear gambit at play in Universal’s mind with Ticket to Paradise: Is there still an audience for the kind of giddy, screwball romantic comedies that were so ubiquitous in the ’90s, like Pretty Woman and Notting Hill? Lately, the rom-com is relegated to streaming services, where twentysomething actors who haven’t been honed in the same kind of Hollywood atmosphere as their forebears struggle against thin material and redundant gimmicks.
The material here is still thin (thanks to the script, by Daniel Pipski and director Ol Parker), and the gimmicks are still redundant. But at least we’ve got two good old-fashioned movie stars in Clooney and Roberts! Much like Marry Me earlier this year, the pitch is clearly to remind us of a time when these films were populated with Movie Stars who have Real Chemistry, even if the film around them doesn’t quite match their material.
For their part, Clooney and Roberts carry what little momentum Parker’s squeaky-clean Balinese farce has in its arsenal. They can do this kind of will-they-won’t-they, Tracy and Hepburn routine in their sleep, and they very frequently do here. It’s comforting to have them back on screen together for the first time since 2016’s Money Monster, swaggering through each scene with quiet ease. They look cozy together, even in their sniping, and you feel in good hands whenever they’re on screen.
Problem is, David and Georgia are as thinly drawn as the rest of the cast, especially when it comes to the source of their animus. Sure, they take verbal potshots at one another for most of the first half, but it’s hard to get a handle on what exactly tore them apart in the first place. Both of them touch on it in the occasional monologue or sparring match, but the stakes seem super low — the usual career-before-family, growing-apart stuff.
Ticket To Paradise (Universal Pictures)
But that’s not enough to get them to “hate each other’s guts” territory, which makes their inevitable float back into each other’s romantic orbit both predictable and flat. When the two are on screen, they’re not inhabiting David and Georgia as they exist on the page; they’re just two old friends comfortably coasting through to a nice big paycheck.
Peaks and Balis: But what low-calorie joys you get from seeing two titans on screen together dissipate anytime Parker’s camera drifts away from them and towards the actual story. Sure, Bali (well, Australia standing in for Bali) is gorgeous to look at, and Parker sure loves to create films that double as tourism ads for their respective countries, as proven by The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Mamma Mia!: Here We Go Again. But its vision of the island nation is as charming as it is infantilized and exoticized, reading less as respectful than patronizing.
The supporting cast drowns in a kelp-filled sea of tropes. Dever’s Lily flounders without much to do, and Bouttier’s Gede is little more than a walking, talking test of David’s white-gaze racism. (He dismisses Gede’s work as a “seaweed farmer” until Gede tells him they’ve worked out a deal with Whole Foods. Sure, he’s an island boy, but he’s also a Titan of Industry.) Lucas Bravo somehow makes a hot, accommodating French pilot seem boring, and Billie Lourd is quickly sidelined as Lily’s archetypal wacky bestie.
Ticket To Paradise (Universal Pictures)
Balinese customs and language are viewed with a sanitized, Orientalist eye, and they make quite a bit of hay out of jokes about knife customs and ornate wedding rituals. The only one to emerge unscathed is first-timer Agung Pindha (who also doubled as the film’s cultural consultant), who carries a natural wit and easy charm as Gede’s dad. Too bad he only has about twelve lines to show off his talents.
The rest is a baffling, head-shaking series of gags, from snakebites to stolen rings to seaweed-gathering races. The film’s most welcome energy comes in a mid-film beer pong challenge, where Clooney and Roberts come alive to the taste of Indonesian moonshine and House of Pain’s “Jump Around.”
The Verdict: The experience of watching Ticket to Paradise is pleasant enough; it goes down easy, like a smooth sugary mai tai. And for a while, it’s nice to just luxuriate in the confident hands of Clooney and Roberts, two movie stars who can coast through any old crap and make it fun. But after the sugar high of the honest-to-goodness blooper reel in the opening credits wears off, the rest of it is liable to give you a hangover.
Where’s It Playing? Ticket to Paradise packs its bags and leaves for theaters October 21st.
Trailer:
