Ticket to Paradise: Bringing the rom-com back to partial life

I probably imagined it, but I felt I heard the cast muttering “it’s fine, it’s fine, we still do this” beneath their collective breath as this tolerable romantic comedy stumbled its way to an unsurprising conclusion. Even before Covid hit, the mainstream romantic comedy had become a rare beast in commercial cinemas. Ticket to Paradise comes across as a religious rite carried out more in hope than expectation of a substantial congregation. By positioning George Clooney and Julia Roberts as chief celebrants, The Church of Working Title makes it clear they are, however, prepared to make one more surge at that elusive mass following. Fair play to them.

It is nice to have the genre back even in such pallid form. Mixing chunks of Meet the Parents with lumps of Noël Coward’s Private Lives, Ol Parker’s film casts our two veterans as David and Georgia, divorced parents brought reluctantly together when their daughter (the always agreeable Kaitlyn Dever) becomes engaged to an apparently unsuitable Balinese seaweed farmer.

[ George Clooney: ‘I was offered $35m for one day’s work’ ]

They begin by spitting blood during the poor girl’s graduation ceremony. They barely resist the urge to brawl when kissing young Lily goodbye at the airport. The news that, some weeks into her holiday, the budding lawyer has hooked up with the bland Gede (Maxime Bouttier) causes them to draft a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and make their way angrily eastward.

The tension between the two leads is by far the most entertaining aspect of the film. Nobody would pretend that we are getting sparring to compare with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant, but both actors know how to bristle convincingly. Clooney favours a wagging head that looks everywhere but at his antagonist when recalling the scale and variety of her past enormities.

[ Julia Roberts: ‘I have never called myself a film actor. I’m just an actor’ ]

Roberts is more comfortable with an unshaking gimlet-eyed stare. “Worst 19 years of my life,” he says of their marriage. “We were only married for five,” she growls. You get a sense of seasoned racing drivers easing themselves once more round the track at something below their optimum speed. Roberts is particularly game, allowing a Balinese character to describe her as resembling a “very attractive horse”.

As is often the case with such things, the younger characters are considerably less interesting. No blame should attach to Dever, so good in Booksmart, who struggles diligently with a thinly written part of hyperglycaemic sweetness. Bouttier has an even more hopeless task with a character that, lest we think the parents have a point, the script allows not the tiniest of faults.

All this takes place in a dubiously exoticized version of Bali that, I’m betting, might play to the locals as Wild Mountain Thyme played to Irish people. Dr Internet tells me young people in that region really do have their canine teeth filed down when they come of age, but that doesn’t justify framing the ritual as a comic set piece. Then again, Ol Parker, director of ace sequel Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, has already made millions with cinematic tourism. So, who are we to question his return to the beach?

[ George Clooney: ‘I had to do a kissing scene, and the director goes, Not like that! And I was, like, Dude, that’s what I do in real life’ ]

It is surely not giving much away to reveal the film has to find a way of getting the oldsters back together. They are so consistently horrid (plotting to rob the happy couple’s rings at one stage), the audience may reasonably feel they are welcome to their bitter loneliness, but Clooney and Roberts are such institutions that, as we always succumb to Christmas, we do ultimately hope it works out for them.

The filmmakers just about pull off that manoeuvre. The jokes land with satisfactory regularity. The locations are lovely throughout. But a middle-ranking Working Title rom-com – more Wimbledon than Notting Hill – may not be enough to revivify a spluttering genre.