Ticket to Paradise features George Clooney and Julia Roberts in a romantic comedy that doesn’t waste their talents, but rather, just gives us what it promises.
Clooney and Roberts play David and Georgia Cotton, a divorced couple who can’t stand each other yet they try to be good parents for the sake of their only child, Lily (Kaityln Dever). After she graduates from college, she takes a trip to Bali with a friend of hers and while she’s there, she becomes engaged to a seaweed farmer (Maxime Bouttier).
David and Georgia fly out to Bali to attend the wedding, but they’re much more interested in sabotaging it in order to make sure Lily doesn’t make the same mistakes they did.
The two hatch one elaborate scheme after another while they’re on the lush island, but it merely serves as an excuse for its two stars to engage in some physical or verbal gags that can be hit or miss. The plane ride to Bali involves deliberate insults hurled at each other and that mostly hits. Other predicaments that take place on the island can sometimes miss.
If the formula for Ticket to Paradise sounds familiar, that’s because it probably is. It reminded me of another Roberts rom-com, My Best Friend’s Wedding in which she tries to destroy another nuptial, but the results don’t land as cleverly as that film did.
Ticket to Paradise is a perfectly content, if somewhat uneven, rom-com. There are stretches where I found myself laughing and then other scenes that fell flat.
However, I am giving a mild recommendation all the same for Ticket to Paradise mainly due to the engaging chemistry between Clooney and Roberts as two actors who seem to have a good time and make the best out of a flimsy script. They’re impossible to dislike for most of their scenes.
This rom-com isn’t paradise, but it’s a flight worth taking.
Grade: B
(Rated PG-13 for some strong language and brief suggestive material.)
