In Ticket to Paradise, Julia Roberts returns to Bali a dozen years after Eat Pray Love, only this time she’s got her ex-husband George Clooney in tow – and they hate each other. Which, since this is a romantic comedy, only means that they are going to end up together at the end – or at the very least, thaw out enough to suggest the possibility of love on the horizon. Fortunately for Julia and George, Ticket isn’t the kind of film to make you feel snide about such rom com conventions. It’s quite charming.

It’s another island escapist fantasy for director Ol Parker, whose Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again was a second surprise hit in that franchise based on the music of ABBA and set on a Greek island. Then again, it’s no surprise when a movie set on an island reaches an audience, since both movies and islands are a way to escape the drudgery of our reality, and the two of them together can double the sense of freedom from our humdrum norms. Ticket to Paradise is a bit more than just escapism, though, as it has some winning thoughts, sentiments and moments with actors we’ve been enjoying on screen for more than 30 years.

Clooney and Roberts play the parents of Lily (Kaitlyn Dever), a recent law school graduate who’s destined to start work at a top firm once she returns from a trip to Bali with her best friend and classic trainwreck, Wren (Billie Lourd). Georgia and David Cotton can’t even be seated next to one another for 15 minutes at her graduation without their bickering disrupting the ceremony, so it’s a particularly unpromising match when they have to team up to try to sabotage their daughter’s wedding.

See, Lily has met Gede (Maxime Bouttier), a Balinese seaweed fisherman who makes her swoon. After a month of blissful idyll with him and a rebalancing of her life priorities, she tells her parents they’re getting married – now. Looks like Georgia and David can’t escape each other, as their seats on the plane and their hotel rooms are both adjacent. But they’re united in their thinking that their daughter is too young to marry, that an island romance is clouding her career ambitions, and that this spontaneous life union will ruin her life – just as it did theirs. They hatch a “trojan horse” plan to keep the wedding from happening. They’ll enter surreptitiously, all smiles, and then plant whatever seeds they need to plant to make sure their daughter returns with them to the states.

Let’s be real folks. All Ticket to Paradise needs is the scene of Clooney and Roberts playing beer pong against their daughter and future son-in-law while classic 1990s hip hop plays in the background. Not specifically that scene, mind you – you might not know that specific scene was coming. But it’s a fantastic one, as the stars cut loose and really lean into their drunkenness, dancing and slurring their words, looking like they might legitimately be drunk and having the time of their lives. It’s a blast.

The point is that all Ticket to Paradise needs to provide us is Clooney and Roberts, before they really can’t make this type of movie anymore. Through some subtle writing, clever decisions and a general resistance to being the most obvious version of itself, it provides us more than that. It probably wouldn’t be as enjoyable without those two stars, but Dever, Lourd and Bouttier do their share to prevent this from just being a two-person show.

Of course Bali does its part as well. The travel budget was well spent for this one. There’s good cultural immersion here, learning as we do about customs related to Indonesian weddings and other traditions. Beautiful greenery and miles of sandy beaches never hurt. Among the local cast, there are fun turns from Gede’s jokester dad, played by Agung Pinda, and his sister (Cintya Dharmayanti), who is above the fray in humorous ways.

In terms of avoiding the most obvious devices, the film shows a curious tendency to go only halfway on its set pieces. There are two separate scenes, for example, where a character gets bitten by local wildlife, be it aquatic or land-dwelling. This sort of scene is probably the biggest crutch of any modern comedy, romantic or otherwise, and it sort of feels like Parker is including it here only out of a sense of obligation. It could just be that he doesn’t know how to direct one of these scenes to get the most out of it, or it could be that he’s knowingly ticking boxes as a response to studio notes. Either way, the film ingratiates itself enough that you want to give it the benefit of the doubt.

Where Parker shows more aptitude is the wistful life lessons learned by characters who can see their golden years on the horizon. This is, of course, a central theme in the Mamma Mia! movies, where older characters are also reflecting on the mistakes they made as a young person prepares to marry. Weddings are the sort of life events that leave us contemplative, and Ticket to Paradise invites this sort of contemplation in its viewers, enough that it exceeds its most obvious, been-there-done-that surface characteristics.

And Clooney and Roberts are the perfect sorts of old pros to deliver this material. We already like them plenty, and we trust that if they’re giving us material that might be beneath them, it’s for all the right reasons. They might have just gone with the full-on Eddie Money reference and called it Two Tickets to Paradise, because you can’t have one of these stars without the other.

 

Ticket to Paradise is currently playing in cinemas.