Ticket To Paradise – The review of the comedy with George Clooney and Julia Roberts | Awards Today

By Marco Ascione

“Ticket to Paradise”Co-written and directed by Ol Parker (Mamma Mia! Here we go again) sees the return of the couple George Clooney and Julia Roberts on the big screen. Twenty years after the first “Ocean’s Eleven” which saw them as protagonists together, the two return to make the viewer experience great emotions, demonstrating that the chemistry between two actors is the strong point for a quality film.

“Ticket to Paradise” tells of a divorced couple (George Clooney and Julia Roberts) who, after receiving an invitation to the wedding from their daughter, decide to leave together for Bali, with the common goal of sabotage her wedding ceremony. The script could be “trivial” but this does not exclude that “Ticket to Paradise” is the romantic comedy we have all been waiting for. Cheerful and fun it manages to give the viewer two hours of pure enjoyment and lightheartedness. Like any self-respecting romantic comedy, the happy ending is upon us without missing those various vicissitudes of which our characters are the protagonists.

Starting from the opening sequence, it is highlighted how the entire feature film was built on the duo George Clooney and Julia Roberts. Through a parallel montage the divorced couple is presented by showing their lives and highlighting the reason that led them to move away: the fear of being adults. Most of the time their actions are shown at the same time, even if they take place in different places, through the use of the split screen, to better emphasize how the two are at the same time distant and yet so close. The central theme of the film is growth, maturing together and understanding each other to be able to accept oneself and enjoy the future.

On the one hand we have Georgia Cotton, played by Julia Roberts, who made the mistake of thinking she wasn’t enjoying her adolescence enough. This will lead her, in fact, to seek comfort from people younger than her like Paul, the plane pilot, to chase that age that she now believes she has lost. On the other is David Cotton, played by George Clooney, who lives with the regret of not having done enough to keep their relationship alive, “accepting” in broad terms that everything has to go this way.

From the directorial point of view it is particularly interesting the way in which the gradual rapprochement of the couple is emphasized. If at the beginning the split screen kept the two protagonists separate, then you will see how one will invade the framing part of the other until the use of this technique completely disappears. Very powerful in this film is the structure of the dialogues, built ad hoc on their interpreters: an example of this is Clooney’s Italian joke. “I speak Italian” ; can only bring to mind the advertising of Nespresso Caffè. This statement may be obvious given that the strong point of a romantic comedy are precisely the dialogues, however, observing how much nowadays we focus more on the embarrassing situation or on the single “gaffe”, it is not so obvious to give importance to the lines recited by the protagonists.

The film is full of moments capable of making the viewer laugh heartily: difficult to forget the scene of the “Beer-Pong” which sees the divorced couple on one side and the future spouses on the other. “Ticket to Paradise” is able to give its audience two hours of happiness, just like “Mamma Mia!” to which it seems to draw inspiration. In some moments, Ol Parker also seems to explain to his viewers his cinematographic influences in the creation of the story, as in the wedding scene in which, just before taking the vows, the future bride says to her fiancé “Wait”: it almost seems to hear Amanda Seyfried in the distance say “Let’s not get married today”.

Ol Parker hits the target and gives life to that kind of romantic comedy that will hardly go unnoticed, able to make everyone who sees it laugh and reflect. “Ticket to Paradise”, with the winning couple Clooney-Roberts, flanked by the young Kaitlyn Dever (Booksmart) and Maxime Bouttier and with Billie Catherine Lourd, the unforgettable Chanel N.3, is in Italian cinemas from 6 Octoberdistributed by Universal Pictures.

VOTE: ★★★★