Ticket to Paradise review: When George Clooney and Julia Roberts' combined star power isn’t enough

George Clooney and Julia Roberts in 'Ticket to Paradise'.

O.I. Parker’s rom-com Ticket to Paradise opens promisingly enough. The film’s raison d’être, the romantic pairing of George Clooney and Julia Roberts, is obvious from the very first scene. In a montage intercut between the two characters they play—Georgia Cotton, a high-flying art dealer whom a moony and soppy hunk years who's younger than she is is wooing with relentless sincerity, and the husband Georgia is divorced from, David Cotton, an equally affluent middle-aged professional living in luxury—it’s made much too obvious that their embittered divorce is going to be fuel for some goofy conflicts. Soon, the estranged couple are at the graduation ceremony of their daughter Lily (Kaitlyn Dever) from law school. Their bickering over being seated next to each other, meant to be cute, sets up the film’s premise—they will antagonise each other in order to reunite. The promise of the stale template is ripe at this point.

A few months later, Georgia and David are on their way to Bali on a flight which Georgia’s French pilot boyfriend (with dreamy eyes) Paul (Lucas Bravo) mans in the cockpit, an inspired lover given to endless bouts of PDA. While on a post-graduation gateway to Bali with her friend Wren (Billie Lourd), Lily decides to marry Gede (Maxime Bouttier), a local seaweed farmer. David and Georgia now have a common goal: Sabotage this whirlwind romance, and prevent their daughter from giving up on law and making the same mistake that they did 25 years ago. They look back at their own ill-fated marriage as a failure of young, hurried love.

Deception, lies and some amount of philosophising ensue, without tempering the film’s primary note of hilarity and comedy. Clash of cultures, east versus west, is by now an over-utilised trope in mass media, especially Hollywood films, to set up conflict. In Ticket to Paradise, the East-versus-West set-up device is a lowly throwback to 1990s’ Hollywood where diversity and inclusion were feeble, aspirational ideas. There are some genuinely funny and warm moments like the one in which David and Georgia get caught up in winning at beer pong at a local bar serving potent local brews, but the film stutters along without inventiveness or original wit for the most part. In secondary roles, neither Bravo nor Dever has much to offer because their characters rest on one-note graphs: a wilful, emotional woman in her 20s, and a sincere, clingy boyfriend meant to be a joke to make the main man, David, seem more attractive.

The Bali backdrop has cinematographer Ole Bratt Birkeland go for the predictably exotic and pretty vistas of waterbodies and a cloudy blue sky accenting thick forests. The Bali populace is all about the balance and mystery that exists between man and nature, while the Americans are creatures of reason. Derivative, regressive cultural dialectics choke the narrative. The reason this film exists then is for Roberts and Clooney to come together and amp up some middle-aged romantic brio. The attempt at rekindling not just their chemistry, last seen in luminous sparks in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 12 (2014), but recreating the magic of big stars on the big screen appears to be the film’s other inspiration. With all the predictability in the story, the lead couple, charming even in scenes that have little or no fire and yet far below the best of what they can do, is the only reason to watch Ticket to Paradise. If you are a 90s’ rom-com lover, you may even enjoy the rewind.

Ticket to Paradise released in theatres on October 6.