Ticket to Paradise
Julia Roberts and George Clooney do a lot with a meager script in Ticket to Paradise.
Julia Roberts and George Clooney prove star power is enough in this rom-com
Georgia and David (Julia Roberts and George Clooney) don’t agree on anything. The happily divorced couple don’t love each other anymore, but they certainly love to bicker. The only thing that they can agree on is their love for Lily (Kaitlyn Dever), their daughter.
So, when Lily announces via email that she’s eschewing her plans to be a lawyer so she can marry a guy she met two weeks ago in Bali, Georgia and David finally have a common goal. The duo agrees that Lily is making a mistake — they got married young and see it as a sign that Lily is setting herself up for unhappiness.
To save their baby from a fate worse than divorce court, Georgia and David team up. They will attend the wedding under the guise of being supportive parents, but secretly do whatever they can to sabotage the ceremony and Lily’s relationship. Then, presumably, they’ll bring their broken-hearted daughter home and usher her back into the life of high achieving they had planned for her.
They sound great, don’t they?
Ticket to Paradise is a study in star power. Nothing about this movie should work: The filmmaking is lazy, the script is dumb, and it’s not even filmed in Bali! But somehow, through sheer willpower and veneered smiles, Clooney and Roberts drag this movie from the dumps and make it watchable.
Director Ol Parker seemed to throw a bunch of rom-com scenes into a blender and cast them upon the screen. Part of the fun of a rom-com is knowing the formula and anticipating the beats. But Ticket to Paradise sort of joylessly bangs each beat: the couple fights, the couple laughs at something, they wake up in bed after an innocent but charged night, and they realize they might have been hasty in breaking up. It’s all here, but Parker doesn’t seem particularly interested in it.
The movie marches through each story beat in a perfunctory way. Roberts and Clooney make eyes at each other, then snipe at each other, but it feels sterile, as if this movie was created in a lab without human involvement. Even when Georgia and David’s machinations are revealed, everyone’s reactions are sort of “meh, that seems like something they’d do”. No one is really upset about it, and life goes on.
Part of the problem is that Julia Roberts has already starred in the quintessential “break up the happy couple” movie — My Best Friend’s Wedding. That film is sharp, a little mean, and full of absolutely zany comedy. Julia Roberts gleefully sabotaging the happy couple is at once awful and sublimely funny to watch. Ticket to Paradise is essentially the tired older sibling to My Best Friend’s Wedding. It doesn’t have time for shenanigans, its back hurts.
Roberts herself also seems mildly less game for shenanigans. No matter what happens to her, she remains picture perfect (seriously, she sleeps in the jungle for a night and wakes up with perfect hair, fresh makeup, and not a smudge on her outfit). There’s a big centerpiece joke about Roberts getting head-butted in the nose. Clooney even makes a joke about her crooked nose after the incident. This is all baffling because Roberts’ nose is perfectly straight and powdered the whole movie. Even when she’s reeling from the head-butt, her hand is over her nose and nothing happens. Did Julia Roberts refuse to have a bloody nose on screen? Did the budget for the film get spent entirely on a series of cute jumpsuits and rompers Roberts dons? Ticket to Paradise doesn’t have an answer.
This isn’t the only time what’s happening in the script seems to be different than what’s happening on screen. Characters reference a sunset that isn’t happening. There’s talk of Clooney’s lack of romantic prospects (because as we all know George Clooney is notoriously hard to look at). And even the reasons for Georgia and David’s breakup seem valid but are pushed aside when it’s time for them to get back together. Does David respect Georgia? Does Georgia really mourn the marriage they had? Who cares, the movie’s over.
One wonders if Clooney and Roberts just wanted a 60-million dollar vacation after years of COVID lockdown.
And while that all seems to be damning, irritatingly Ticket to Paradise works, mostly because Clooney and Roberts are so charismatic they’re hard to resist. When the duo challenges their daughter and her intended to beer pong and get raucously drunk, the movie absolutely sings. Watching Roberts and Clooney laugh and act silly with each other is almost worth the price of a ticket. Clooney and Roberts are movie stars, and even when the story is weak and the director disinterested, they can command a scene. Watching bloopers of the duo during the credits might have been the highlight of this low-effort affair.
If you’re a fan of romantic comedies, you could do worse than Ticket to Paradise — Bride Wars still exists, after all. For those that appreciate the art of being a movie star, this is a great example of how valuable star power is when the production is lackluster.
Verdict: George Clooney and Julia Roberts are still fun to watch, but this movie is probably only for rom-com diehards.
