Ticket just the ticket
Ticket To Paradise (M, 103 mins) Directed by Ol Parker Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★
It’s the reuniting of Julia Roberts and George Clooney that will sell the tickets. They are movie stars in the truest sense, at the very top of the pantheon. And Roberts and Clooney do have some serious backstory, with all the chemistry of their Ocean’s 11 and 12 gettogethers still sloshing around and unresolved nearly two decades on.
Ticket To Paradise writer and director Ol Parker is a veteran at crowd-pleasing rom-coms. He wrote and directed the likeable Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again and is credited as writer on both Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films, as well as the happily odd A Boy Called Christmas.
Parker is a writer who generally makes his projects just slightly more mischievous than the standard elevator pitch would suggest they needed to be.
In a world awash in formulaic nonsense that never tries to break the mould, I reckon we should be pleased that there are film-makers like Parker, happy to throw a tiny pinch of grit into the saccharine once in a while.
And so it proves in Ticket To Paradise. Roberts and Clooney play a very divorced couple – ‘‘longest 19 years of my life’’, says Clooney’s David. ‘‘We were only married for five,’’ answers Roberts’ Georgia.
They are compelled to join forces when their daughter Lily seems about to turn a post-college holiday fling into an actual marriage. She is in Bali, with the charming and adorable seaweed farmer Gede by her side.
And so the bickering parents fly to Bali to prevent Lily from ‘‘making the same mistake’’ they did of marrying too young. We learn early that Georgia has moved on – with a puppy-eyed and besotted French airline pilot, no less – and David is single, as he serially is.
Of course the romance of Bali, the enforced proximity and seeing Lily so happy to be in love will rekindle feelings between the pair. Well, duh.
Without those names and faces on the poster, not even Parker’s reputation for making popular hits would have been enough to find this film the distribution it has.
But Roberts and Clooney and co command the fees they do because they can elevate material this slender into something that is at least watchable.
And while Ticket To Paradise might seem like a film with no surprises to spring and not much to say, it is a bit better than it needed to be.
There’s the Roberts and Clooney magic, of course, and Kaitlyn Dever (Short Term 12) and French/Balinese musician and model Maxime Bouttier are great as the young couple.
Parker also treats the setting, people and culture of Bali with a palpable and refreshing respect. Ticket To Paradise is a frothy, disposable film that does exactly what it sets out to do. If you think you might like it, I can pretty much guarantee that you will.
Ticket to Paradise is now screening in cinemas nationwide.