This latest exotically set comedy from the writer/director of Mamma Mia! Who also penned The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its follow-up has two bona fide stars at his disposal, Julia Roberts and George Clooney.
Now, in Ticket To Paradise, their fifth on-screen collaboration continues to display an innate charisma and spunky rapport. But filmmaker/co-scenarist Ol Parker lets them down, in what we would hope would be a fun, escapist throwback of a romantic comedy.
Not that there aren’t some frothy interludes to make up for what just doesn’t coalesce in ways that nearly measure up to the leads, and their divergent manners as a feuding, divorced couple Georgia and David Cotton out to prevent their daughter Lily (Kaitlyn Never) from repeating their careless impetuousness.
This ‘Paradise’ has a mean-spirited tic about it that spoils what unspools with familial drama leaving it more as a half-hearted trifle than a little sentimentally sophisticated tale. We could probably do worst than in the company of Roberts and a goofier Clooney (who both shined in the more sophisticated Ocean’s Eleven over two decades ago). But, the laughs and emotions aren’t genuinely felt as Billie Lourd and Lucas Bravo are part of the ensemble as partying best friends and a smooth pilot boyfriend on the way to sea weed farming in Bali.