The following is my review for the film Ticket To Paradise. A reminder, you can click this link to see how I score films when I review them.
PLOT
A divorced couple teams up and travels to Bali to stop their daughter from making the same mistake they think they made twenty five years ago.
REVIEW
After a few years of both seemingly taking a break, two iconic actors, from arguably the last modern film age with “true movie stars”, in George Clooney and Julia Roberts, have been getting back at it of late, and inevitably we were going to see their great chemistry come together once again. Enter a new simple and light rom-com in Ticket To Paradise, which came out to international markets last month before finally hitting the states in late October.
While the cinematography isn’t anything mind-blowing, there are some really pretty looking shots as you’d expect from a story set in literal paradise. The direction is competent enough albeit nothing special, and the score is actually a pretty big highlight of the film for me, the chemistry between Clooney and Roberts is still as good as it always has been, and Kaitlyn Dever continues her rise in the industry by turning in a great supporting performance.
There’s nothing much here that changes the game when it comes to this subgenre though to the screenplay’s credit it does try by having us follow the romance between the lead characters’ daughter and her soon-to-be-husband; attempting to have them feel more like people rather than plot devices for Clooney and Roberts’ characters to awkwardly get closer to each other again. It also ends things in a more open-ended way than I expected it was going to. But the movie also leans heavily on tropes like a love triangle or typical humor found in these sort of films like drunken nights and vacation excursions gone wrong. So you get a little of both worlds in terms of originality and derivativness.
But there’s just enough here, mainly thanks to Clooney and Roberts single-handily carrying the movie during its weaker points, that this is a safe, cute, little romance flick that I can see myself recommending to my parents, but also one that I have my doubts many will remember existing years from now. Its a ticket worth using to go check this out if you love yourself some comfort food movies, but don’t go in expecting to be blown away either.
