By Terry Staunton

Published: Thursday, 15 September 2022 at 12:00 am


3.0 out of 5 star rating

Take an idyllic overseas beachside location where a young bride is planning her dream wedding, add parents in the throes of cat-and-mouse conflict, and what have you got? Hands down if your answer is Mamma Mia!, although while mercifully free of that film’s menopausal karaoke, Ticket to Paradise nevertheless slavishly adheres to conventional, instantly recognisable rom-com tropes.

George Clooney is go-getter Chicago architect David, long divorced from Julia Roberts’s sophisticated Los Angeles gallery owner Georgia, the couple’s paths crossing only in matters concerning their law student daughter Lily (Kaitlyn Dever).

Having lived separate lives for 15 years, viewers first see them crash into each other’s orbits at Lily’s graduation ceremony, the antagonism of old quickly bubbling to the surface (“Just for once, I wish you would back me up,” barks David during one prickly exchange. “But then I’d be wrong too,” retorts Georgia, matter-of-factly).

Fast forward a couple of months and Lily’s post-graduation holiday romance with Bali seaweed farmer Gede (Maxime Bouttier) has blossomed into something much more serious. Still blowing on the burned fingers of their own catastrophic plighting of troths, the father and mother of the bride-to-be rush to the pictureseque Indonesian province, to throw a spanner in the works of their lovestruck offspring’s nuptials.

Thus, the scene is set for adversaries forming an uneasy alliance to prevent the apple of their eye from repeating their own mistakes, the supposedly wiser elders’ course of action less about persuasion than it is sabotage.

There’s little need to outline the route the plot takes from here, because what follows is a by-the-book, curveball-bereft yarn with sparks flying all too intermittently, a smidgen of half-hearted slapstick (two scenes involving animal bites), and the occasional uncomfortable dig at foreigners and their funny ways.

Clooney and Roberts are terrific, though, their combined star power beaming with the breezy chemistry we didn’t see enough of in their last joint outings as estranged spouses, 2001’s Ocean’s Eleven and its 2004 sequel.

Both appear to relish the acid-tongued sparring, not least on the flight to Bali (with Georgia’s current, much younger squeeze Lucas Bravo as their pilot), and when a low-key night out with their future son-in-low descends into let-loose drunken dancing to club hits from their own twenties.