The art and craft of acting is incredibly addictive. It’s got lows (extreme discomfort and embarrassment) that make the highs (rapt audiences in the palm of one’s hand, weeping at one’s drama and hysterical at one’s comedy) an absolute flood of endorphins. Master actor John Gielgud didn’t call acting “half shame, half glory” for nothing.
And, of course, George Clooney and Julia Roberts. They’ve been making movies together for more than 20 years now, first in 2001’s “Ocean’s Eleven,” again in “Ocean’s Twelve,” then “Money Monster,” and “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.”
Of course, both of them drip charisma and charm—that’s the prerequisite for the job, just as Shaq’s 300-pound athletic, goliath self was a prerequisite for being the most dominating center in basketball history. This is the fundamental thing that keeps their new movie, “Ticket to Paradise,” afloat.
There’s a Thin Line Between Love and Hate
Naturally, the film begins with the characters of our good friends George and Julia not being able to stand the sight of each other. They hate each other in the specific ways that, according to comedians Sinbad and Chris Rock, only a formerly married couple can. In a fairly funny cross-cutting exposition dump, we realize they each saw their entire past together play out very differently, where each imagines being the hero and the other as the complete idiot.
They got married, and divorced five years later but not before having a daughter, Lily (Kaitlyn Dever), who, at her college graduation, can’t even seat them next to each other because they’ll fight over their shared armrest.
After graduation, Lily sets off with her former roommate and best friend Wren (Billie Lourd) for a little R ’n’ R before attending law school. Off to Bali they go (Dever and Lourd starred together, hilariously, in 2019’s “Booksmart"), where Lily promptly falls head over heels in love with a young, handsome seaweed farmer (seaweed farmer!), Gede (Maxime Bouttier).
When the girls were facing danger after their incredibly inept tour boat left them a mile from shore, he happened by and rescued them. Marriage plans happen so fast it’ll make your head spin.
It makes parents Georgia (Roberts) and David’s (Clooney) heads spin even faster. Dump law school for a lowly seaweed farmer? The insanity! And so they hightail it to Bali with the intention of lying profusely: They’ll do a Trojan horse ploy of agreeing to the marriage on the surface and then sneaking out in the middle of the night and sabotaging, looting, and sacking the plans. It’s the first thing they’ve agreed on in years. Teamwork!
The Family That Sabotages Together …
Due their own misadventures and residual bitterness, David and Georgia are of course deeply cynical about the institution of marriage, and so the moral dilemma and the ethical questions of causing a young, blissful love relationship to tank fly right out the window. Law school? Seaweed farmer? What’s the objection here?
The main question is how will they reconcile their own differences so that they can wreck their kid’s attempt to make a similar mistake? The fun lies, of course, in them being hampered by their inability to go more than a few seconds without bickering. They snipe viciously, reopen old wounds, and relitigate ancient arguments. They insist that they hate each other and act like it most of the time, but one also gets the feeling that they enjoy the one-upmanship.
Will Georgia marry the dashing French airline pilot she’s dating? Will David be able to let his little girl go? Most importantly: Will the feisty old couple get back together?
Relationships like this are many-layered, and so when the two of them get soused, recall their college teamwork of beating the pants off beer pong opponents, and hit the dance floor to House of Pain’s “Jump Around” to their daughter’s immense embarrassment, you can see the ending coming a mile off. But then again, you could see it two seconds after the movie started.
“Ticket to Paradise” does an old thing we’ve seen a million times before, does it pretty well, and with people we like to watch doing it, whom we’ve seen do it before. It’s likely this lack of reinvention that’s hauling in box office bucks.
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