Ticket to Paradise
Extremely light-hearted fare is buoyed by the presence of Julia Roberts and George Clooney.
When their daughter Lily (Kaitlyn Dever) goes to Bali after graduation, she meets a young man named Gede (Maxime Bouttier) who she decides to marry; casting off her plans of taking up law in New York to instead farm seaweed with him in Bali. Two people who aren’t having that, however, are her divorced parents, David (George Clooney) and Georgia (Julia Roberts). While they passionately despise one another, they find themselves in Bali, needing to put their differences aside as they team up to try and convince their daughter, and their future son in law, that this is a bad idea.
Ticket to Paradise, from a story perspective, is just confounding. It makes no sense from a filmmaking perspective either. Why do we have the parents touch down, and the wedding scheduled to happen almost immediately, rather than giving them a few days to wreak havoc? Why do they jump off the boat sans luggage? Why are we shown a little bit of these two falling in love, when any of it really makes little to no sense? The whole movie is full of mind-boggling creative decisions, story threads that go nowhere and a swiftly abandoned and a general sense that there was something to be had here, but it has been violently missed.
The saving grace of the film is undoubtedly Clooney and Roberts. Despite initial concerns upon hearing that the duo didn’t learn their lines until the day they had to shoot the scene, as they wanted to ‘keep it fresh’, the pair’s work together is undeniably good. Their natural chemistry shines on screen, and while 90-100% of the ‘jokes’ in this movie don’t land, every moment between them has a certain buzz that keeps you smiling.
The other shock standout is Billie Lourd as Lily’s oft-drunk best friend Wren Butler. She is frequently funny, if not laugh out loud so, and the chemistry between her and Clooney speaks to a potentially more interesting and ambitious film hidden amongst this. Alas, ultimately, while Ticket to Paradise is inoffensive and enjoyable enough, it is a disappointingly simplistic, ambling and structurally disparate take on material that could have been more.
