Film Review — Ticket to Paradise
George Clooney and Julia Roberts are wasted in this undercooked romantic comedy.
Common objections to my criticisms of substandard romantic comedies include 1) “It’s just a bit of entertaining escapist fluff”, 2) “But I love X-lead actor”, and 3) “Rom-coms just aren’t your thing”. I declare that to be male cattle excrement on all three fronts. 1) Entertaining escapist fluff can be magnificent, so it is entirely valid to criticise a film of this kind when it fails to meet high standards. 2) Beloved movie stars are only as good as the material they are given. 3) Romantic comedies absolutely and emphatically are my thing, as this article proves. But I don’t play genre favourites. I have high standards across the board.
With the above in mind, I can state quite objectively that Ticket to Paradise is a substandard romantic comedy. Yes, it’s intended to be entertaining escapist fluff. Yes, it stars George Clooney and Julia Roberts, both of whom I like a great deal. And yes, it is a cynically lazy piece of work that manages to waste the potential of both big stars.
The plot is a variation on the renewed-romantic-fireworks-between-divorced-couple trope that used to be deployed during the Hollywood Production Code era to circumvent the prohibition on depictions of adultery (the leads would…
