It’s no His Girl Friday or The Awful Truth—two divorce-centric screwball comedies with Cary Grant, alongside Rosalind Russell and Irene Dunne, respectively—but in George Clooney and Julia Roberts, Ticket to Paradise at least has the talent to offer amusing echoes of those classics in the genre. (It doesn’t quite have the script, which indulges in a sentimentality that the earlier films wisely avoided.) The stars play a long-divorced couple reluctantly forced to work together when their daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) suddenly decides to marry a seaweed farmer in Bali (Maxime Bouttier) and live there, rather than pursue the law career her parents had planned for her. The early bickering is a bit forced, but once Clooney and Roberts settle into their characters the natural camaraderie on display in the Ocean’s Eleven films comes to the surface, here weathered by their (and their characters’) years of experience. While they’re enjoyable together, even Roberts on her own makes Ticket to Paradise worth watching; the movies have missed her ease on-screen, which is always tempered—just when it risks being flighty—with a quiet seriousness. Lucas Bravo also deserves a nod for his supporting role as Roberts’ dippy but devoted younger boyfriend. Just when the movie needs someone to get bit by a snake for a comic jolt, he capably takes the hit.
(10/23/2022)
