Ticket to Paradise
George Clooney and Julia Roberts team up (again) as the parents from hell in a mechanical and inane sitcom.
Meet the parents: Julia Roberts and George Clooney
There’s a thin line between charm and smarm and George Clooney can swing either way. In this formulaic and predictable sitcom, the actor adopts two modes: congenitally smug and embarrassingly goofy. It’s not a good look. He’s united with Julia Roberts for a fifth time, which may be why they’ve lowered their guard, mistaking petulant sniping for sophisticated badinage.
They play David and Georgia Cotton, two privileged, spoiled cynics who used to be married to each another. After humiliating their daughter Lily (Kaitlyn Dever) at her graduation ceremony, they cross swords again at the airport to see her and her best friend Wren (Billie Lourd) off on their dream vacation to Bali. While there, Lily is rescued from the ocean by a local seaweed farmer Gede (Maxime Bouttier) and falls head over heels for him. Her love is reciprocated and they soon plan a traditional wedding, inviting Lily’s parents to Bali to give her away. Not wishing for their daughter to make the same mistake that they did twenty-five years ago, David and Georgia agree to join forces to sabotage the event…
It's a hard act to convert mutual loathing into hilarity, and the caricatures that are David and Georgia are given little comic traction by Ol Parker and Daniel Pipski’s script. What the audience does feel is the degradation and nausea suffered by Lily at the hands of her meddling, bickering parents as they collude in the destruction of her ideal romance. As Georgia explains on the phone, “I won’t let her throw her life away on an impossibly handsome guy in the most beautiful place in the world.” Occasionally, Julia Roberts rises above the material, but with a line like, “even my hangover has a hangover,” she’s on a losing wicket. Even the normally dependable Billie Lourd (daughter of Carrie Fisher) can make little of her sardonic sidekick, while the film’s physical buffoonery beggars belief (at one point Clooney attempts to spear a wild hog while shouting at it – it runs off). A darker edge would have given the film weight (as in Danny DeVito's The War of the Roses), but this is piffling, soppy and uninspired ‘escapism’. It’s an indication of the project’s laziness that even the title has been used a minimum of six times before.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Kaitlyn Dever, Billie Lourd, Maxime Bouttier, Lucas Bravo, Dorian Djoudi, Ilma Nurfauziah, Agung Pindha, Ifa Barry, Cintya Dharmayanti, Geneviève Lemon, Sean Lynch.
Dir Ol Parker, Pro Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Sarah Harvey and Deborah Balderstone, Ex Pro George Clooney and Julia Roberts, Screenplay Ol Parker and Daniel Pipski, Ph Ole Bratt Birkeland, Pro Des Owen Paterson, Ed Peter Lambert, Music Lorne Balfe, Costumes Lizzy Gardiner, Sound Glenn Freemantle, Dialect coach Gabrielle Rogers.
Working Title Films/Smokehouse Pictures/Red Om Films-Universal Pictures.
103 mins. USA/UK. 2022. UK Rel: 20 September 2022. US Rel: 21 October 2022. Cert. 12A.
