Ticket to Paradise Review

Star driven rom-coms have become a rarity in cinemas in recent years. Universal and Working Title Pictures aims to bring them back with George Clooney and Julia Roberts teaming up for a fifth film.

David and Georgia Cotton (Clooney and Roberts) are a divorced couple who hate each other. The only thing that forces them to interact is their daughter, Lily (Kaitlyn Dever). When Lily travels to Bali she gets engaged with Gede (Maxime Bouttier) and plans to marry him imminently. David and Georgia must put aside their differences to stop the wedding.

Ticket to Paradise was one of those films where the people making it were enjoying themselves. The bloopers at the end showed the actors having a good time joking with each other and playing pranks. The actors got to spend time in some nice tropical locations. Whilst they had a nice time making the film, it didn’t translate in the actual film.

Ticket to Paradise was a cookie-cutting rom-com that felt like it came off a conveyor belt. It was so predictable regarding its plot and jokes that it wouldn’t be surprising that an AI programme wrote the screenplay. This made Ticket to Paradise a generic project.

The plot has been done before where the parents disapprove of their daughter’s new partner. It was done in projects like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Why Him, and the BBC Three series Cuckoo. These projects vary in quality, but they all had the same basic DNA.

Because of these factors Ticket to Paradise was a grind to sit through. It was one of those films where it felt like the audiences were paying for the actors to have a tropical holiday. The humour was laboured and predictable. Whilst the actors had chemistry offscreen it wasn’t present onscreen, especially when Clooney and Roberts were meant to be trading barbs with each other. Dever is considered a rising star because of her roles in Booksmart and Unbelievable but in Ticket to Paradise she was wasted as the daughter who thought a wedding with Gede would be a good idea.

Billie Lourd’s character, Wren was designed to be the breakout character. She was a heavy drinking party girl. Her introduction in the film was her being hungover and looking through her big box of condoms. Lourd had comedic timing with her small actions and looks like getting hold of more drinks than expected. There were some lighter moments like Clooney speaking Italian, but the film needed more than light humour to overcome the predictable plot.

The second act of the film meandered because it was about the characters hanging around. David and Georgia were trying to get Lily and Gede to break up, but the characters were enjoying the activities like swimming with dolphins, going on hikes, and having family feasts. This bumming around in tropical luxury made Ticket to Paradise feel more like the Adam Sander films from the early 2010s, an excuse for people working on a film to have a jolly.

Ticket to Paradise was a paint-the-number film. It was lazy, unimaginative, and made as a product.