Tonight's Movie: Ticket to Paradise (2022)

Anyone looking for a good, old-fashioned romantic comedy should enjoy TICKET TO PARADISE (2022), a new film starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts.

This movie only popped onto my radar screen a few weeks ago when I saw the trailer. I was a bit unsure whether the movie would work, as the couple spend most of the trailer bickering, but as it turned out, most of those scenes are from the early part of the movie. And the film does work wonderfully well.

Back in 2014 I named Kevin Costner and Julia Roberts as my favorite actors of the last quarter century, and that still holds true today. Julia may be in her 50s now but she's still got big-screen magic, and the same can be said of Clooney, who's now past 60. For those of us of a "certain age," it's rather wonderful to see a film focused on a couple who aren't kids.

Clooney and Roberts play David and Georgia Cotton, a long-divorced couple who are shocked when their daughter Lily (Kaitlyn Dever), newly graduated from law school, emails from her graduation vacation in Bali to announce that she's getting married...to a Balinese seaweed farmer, no less.

David and Georgia hurry to Bali, anxious to stop Lily from making the same mistakes they made as a young couple. But as they get to know Lily's fiance Gede (Maxime Bouttier) and realize how happy their daughter is, they have second thoughts about their initial plan to break things up.

The parents also find themselves gradually working through some of their old issues and drawing closer, which is complicated when Georgia's younger pilot boyfriend Paul (Lucas Bravo) shows up in Bali as a surprise. Bravo comes off as a nice -- if somewhat silly -- guy who's just the wrong man for Georgia. The "Ralph Bellamy character" lives!

TICKET TO PARADISE is simply a very enjoyable "feel good" film about family and relationships. I felt the gradual, tentative development of David and Georgia's "new" relationship was handled realistically; not everything is neat and tidy at movie's end, as they clearly have a ways to go, but their story ends on a very "up" note.

Dever and Bouttier are charming as the young couple, and I liked that although there are bumps along the way, nothing shakes their commitment.

I also found Billie Lourd quite delightful as Lily's best friend Wren, whom one might describe as a soulful partier; it's a nice role, and she makes the most of it. Lourd clearly inherited acting talent and a sense of humor from her mother (Carrie Fisher) and grandmother (Debbie Reynolds). Lourd and Dever previously both appeared in BOOKSMART (2019).

I'd add that it's rather neat that Clooney and Lourd each have familial connections to beloved '50s singers-movie stars.

The movie is rated PG-13, and while it does have the odd swear word or off-color joke, this is one of the more family-friendly "new" films I've seen in quite a while. That includes the overarching themes of young love and family love.

I'd add that I saw some horrifically depressing trailers before the movie started; the world needs a lot more of TICKET TO PARADISE or TOP GUN: MAVERICK (2022) and a lot less of the dreck I saw advertised today. TICKET TO PARADISE is doing nicely at the box office, and TOP GUN: MAVERICK is still playing here months after release, so perhaps there is hope for more positive theatrical films like these in the future.

TICKET TO PARADISE runs 104 minutes. It was directed by Ol Parker, who also worked on the screenplay with Daniel Pipski. The movie was filmed in Queensland, Australia, by Ole Bratt Birkland.

In this end, this film made me happy and left me smiling, and what more could one ask from a movie?

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