Mark Reviews Movies: TICKET TO PARADISE (2022)

Ticket to Paradise, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 20, 2022

Ticket to Paradise barely has a plot, doesn't implement more than a couple jokes, and clearly entrusts its entire success to the appeal of its two stars. This is a recurring problem with mainstream American comedies as of late, yet here, co-writer/director Ol Parker nearly gets away with it. It's not on account of the director or the screenplay or anything/anyone else involved in the movie, mind you. The reason amounts to two names: George Clooney and Julia Roberts.

Some have bemoaned the death of the movie star in recent years, but Parker's movie suggests such reports might be greatly exaggerated. Without the presence of Clooney and Roberts, there's very little about this material that might have worked or even held any interest. With them and the easy but antagonistic chemistry they have together, though, the movie comes close to justifying its existence.

One imagines Parker and Daniel Pipski wrote the entire screenplay hoping that its lead actors would be big names with a lot of star-power appeal. While one can—and definitely should—criticize their efforts for falling back on such a lazy tactic, that gamble at least breaks even on a creative level.

Clooney plays David, a well-to-do Chicago architect, and Roberts plays Georgia, a Los Angeles-based art dealer. The two had a whirlwind romance during college and an even more disastrous marriage immediately after. They now try to stay as far away from and have as little contact with each other as possible, but the two have a daughter named Lily (Kaitlyn Dever, who, it should be noted, does hold her own). She's about to graduate from college, start a job as a lawyer in Chicago, and have the life she of which she always dreamed and for which her parents, despite their differences, always hoped.

The main joke, obviously, is that David and Georgia hate each other. Each one snipes at and insults the other whenever there's an excuse to do so, such as an opening back-and-forth that takes place in different parts of the country. David explains the big, romantic gesture he made to propose to Georgia to a co-worker, while Georgia explains to a colleague how it only proved from the start of their marriage how little David actually knew her. He dropped to one knee as she was receiving her diploma, and while he thinks her tears were those of joy, she points out that she was mortified, because she hates surprises.

All of this seems to be heading one way, as David and Georgia reunite for Lily's graduation ceremony and start her life closer to her father than her mother, but on a vacation to Bali with her best friend Wren (Billie Lourd), Lily falls in love with a local seaweed farmer named Gede (Maxime Bouttier). A bit more than a month later, David and Georgia have to meet again—this time to travel to Bali for their daughter's wedding to a guy they've never met, in a place that's far away from the career she was supposed to have, and under circumstances that, to both of the parents from their shared experience, seem like a huge mistake.

The plot has to David and Georgia joining forces in an effort to sabotage the wedding, obviously. None of it is particularly laugh-out-loud funny, but to be fair, there isn't much of an effort on Parker and Pipski's parts to create elaborate comic setpieces, set up long-running jokes with payoffs, or do much with the characters who aren't played by Clooney and Roberts. When the movie attempts such moves, it often stumbles, such as with the running joke of Georgia's new and uncomfortably agreeable boyfriend Paul (Lucas Bravo, who is amusing but given a dead-end of a character, as a random snakebite proves), or outright fails, such as a scene in which the soon-to-be family swims with dolphins, only for one to bite David out of the blue.

No, the approach here is more about a breezy, light-hearted attitude, and that's why the presence of Clooney and Roberts is so vital. The two actors are experts at this kind of acting, which demands that they look completely natural at forcibly exuding charm. All of the familiar tics are there, from the way Clooney winds up his lines with a big smile to the occasional laugh that will suddenly erupt out of Roberts. Beneath that, though, there's the easy way they have with the dialogue, which only amounts to a lot of bickering but is funny because the actors' knowing sense of timing (David saying his marriage was the worst 19 years of his life, only for Georgia to point out they were married for five—only for him, without missing a beat, to note that he's including the time for recovery).

The two certainly carry this movie, although it is a bit smarter—mainly in the way the filmmakers don't take the obvious route of what might happen between a constantly bickering couple—and more generous—Lily and Gede's romance is given some time and genuine sweetness—than it has to be. There's a significant temptation to give Ticket to Paradise a pass on account of these self-evident qualities, and surely, some undoubtedly will do so. Clooney and Roberts make that a very tempting prospect, to be sure.

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