'Ticket to Paradise' takes audiences on an OK trip with dear old friends

Can George Clooney and Julia Roberts save the theatrical romantic comedy? The genre is still thriving on streaming services but has been on life support in cinemas for the past decade or so — ever since Hollywood decided to focus full-time on franchises made for eight-year-olds and after Matthew McConaughey got all respectable on us. The rom-com renaissance of the 1990s that made Roberts, Meg Ryan and Sandra Bullock into box office juggernauts is all but unthinkable in today’s multiplex marketplace, where cartoonish spectacles of mass destruction have elbowed out any milder moviegoing preferences, especially the once-essential pleasures of watching charming and attractive people fall in love with each other in exotic locations and against their better judgment.

“Ticket to Paradise” feels like being handed a glass of water after a long walk across the desert. It’s lukewarm tap water and a little cloudy, but you’re grateful for it all the same. The picture coasts almost entirely on the charisma of its superstar leads and the massive amount of affection we in the audience have accrued for them over the years. (Anecdotally, this is the movie that the most non-movie people have asked me about ever since the trailer dropped back in July.) It’s Clooney and Roberts’ fifth film together, and they’ve got the easy rapport of an old married couple — or in this case an old divorced couple, seated together and sniping at their adult daughter’s law school graduation.

They complain endlessly to bystanders caught in the crossfire about how much they despise one another, but we can tell right from the start that they’re mad because they’re still madly in love. After all, it’s George and Julia. (Using their surnames feels unnecessarily formal for stars we’ve known so long.) The bickering exes are thrown together once again when their aforementioned offspring, Lily (Kaitlyn Dever) decides to scrap her promising legal career and get engaged to a hunky Balinese seaweed farmer (Maxime Bouttier). The concerned parents find themselves flying to Southeast Asia in agreement for the first time in ages: this wedding will not happen.

Roberts, of course, has a storied career of disrupting movie nuptials going back to “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and “Runaway Bride,” which adds to the slightly saggy, greatest-hits medley vibe that “Ticket to Paradise” so often gives off. The screenplay, co-written by director Ol Parker with Daniel Pipski, could charitably be called an underachiever, allowing ample space within the scenes for the stars to vamp. Our Julia can still wield a one-liner like a stiletto switchblade, as when her ex tries to talk over her: “I’m sorry, did the middle of my sentence interrupt the beginning of yours?” Clooney does the rakish, secretly sensitive thing he can probably pull off in his sleep, making you wonder if a man can be made entirely out of charm.

The appreciably brief scenes with Dever and her fiancé only underscore what rare specimens of mega-watt star power George and Julia truly are. You watch them onscreen and can’t help but think, “They don’t make ‘em like they used to.” Then you realize with a shudder that contemporary Hollywood has abandoned the infrastructure that created stars like Roberts and Clooney in the first place. Magazine covers and gossip columns have been overtaken by reality TV gargoyles while up-and-coming actors are required to be so ubiquitous shilling on social media that there’s no room to cultivate the mystique necessary for a movie star career. It also doesn’t help that studios have stopped making the kind of modest, mid-tier projects where performers learn tricks of the trade that come in handy when propping up films like “Ticket to Paradise.”

I said going in that all I wanted was at least one scene where Julia Roberts looks down, all sad, then raises her face to the camera with misty eyes as that smile slowly creeps across her face, getting wider and wider until it fills the screen and lights up the entire auditorium. Parker is smart enough to give us a couple of those, with some lovely backlighting, too. He also puts George Clooney in a tuxedo on the beach. Nobody else is wearing a tuxedo in the movie, but the filmmaker understands that if you're coming to see a George Clooney movie, you're going to want to see him in a tuxedo. Parker previously directed 2018’s shockingly spectacular “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again,” a sequel so far superior to the original it almost feels like a different genre. His work on “Ticket to Paradise” is significantly less assured, but he knows how to stay out of the way of his stars. For the film’s big climax, he simply allows the camera to linger on their faces, watching them wordlessly come to the same conclusion with contagious giggles.

There is something a bit chintzy about it, seeing two stars of such magnitude in a rickety vehicle that probably wouldn't pass muster back in the rom-com's 1990s heyday. But it’s enjoyable spending time with George and Julia all the same. “Ticket to Paradise” is the kind of movie that ends with a freeze-frame and an outtake reel over the credits. The bloopers are the best part.