‘Ticket to Paradise’ Is A Beautiful Trip
Starring George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Sean Lynch, Arielle Carver-O’Neill, Billie Lourd, Kaitlyn Dever
Rated PG-13
Comedy, Romance
Run time: 1 hr, 44 min
Directed by Ol Parker
In theaters October 21, 2022
Every few months, I get to excitedly exclaim that the romcom renaissance is upon us, and then we enter a drought of this genre. Lather, rinse, repeat. I thought this with Crazy Rich Asians, Long Shot was a promising entry and Last Christmas felt like a modern classic with holiday romance. But between Bros, a myriad of streaming romantic excellence and now this film, it actually could be happening! I mean, we live in a world where we have a romcom starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts. It’s basically movie royalty come back to claim their thrones. And despite the fact that award shows will (unfortunately) probably never give this genre the appreciation it deserves, I think it’s safe to say that they are absolutely what romcoms - and we - need and deserve.
David and Georgia (Clooney and Roberts, respectively) are a divorced couple that get a surprising alert from their recent-college-grad-and-seemingly-levelheaded daughter, Lily, (Dever) who has fallen in love with a local (Bouttier) on a trip to Bali with her best friend (Lourd) and decided to get married. Torn between wanting to support their daughter and desperately needing to stop her from making what they feel is a rehash of their own mistake 25 years prior, the exes have to fly to paradise and assess the situation. Hijinks are interspersed with snarky barbs and smirks as the once-couple have to band together and do what they think is best for Lily, whether she knows what that is or not.
The more I sit and think about this production, the more I realize that the entirety of my love for it is balanced precariously on the shoulders of its two leads, with an honorary mention to the utterly gorgeous scenery behind them. The plot itself falls a bit short. We are given no real reason to be invested in Lily’s love story. The movie jumps from her first kiss with the handsome stranger to her parents en route to her wedding. Without any vantage point into her whirlwind romance, there’s no real reason to side with her against her parents. Sure, they go about it completely the wrong way and often seem flat out mean, but she met a guy and decided to marry him and move literally across the world in the span of two months. I would be concerned, too. I just may have, oh, I don’t know, had a conversation about it rather than get up to shenanigans right away.
That being said, Julia Roberts and George Clooney play off each other so well that I almost didn’t think too much about that. I did notice the uncomfortable way the film decided to play up the “cultural differences” and awkwardness between the two families, and it was awkward, one note and extremely outdated. The leads have aged far better than that tired trope. At times, the ever-so-proud parents are almost too sharp with their witty banter, but for the most part, the charisma and evident friendship between the two actors make it hard to look away. Somehow, despite this being a romantic comedy, I wasn’t really caring much about the love stories, but I was absolutely along for the ride.