Ticket to Paradise review: Julia Roberts and George Clooney ride a slow boat to midlife romance

Their hair is still glorious; their teeth gleam like satellites. It's the rom-coms that got small, not these monolithic movie stars, and Ticket to Ride (in theaters Friday) is apparently the best that 2022 could conjure for two of the genre's last unicorns: an antic wisp of sun-soaked shenanigans, as light and vaporous as a Bali breeze.

That's actually where the story lands after a brief, pained exposition: Divorced for two decades, L.A. gallerist Georgia (Julia Roberts) and architect David (George Clooney) are happy to interact as little as possible beyond the one good thing their union produced, a daughter named Lily (Dopesick's Kaitlyn Dever). She's a smart, sweet kid, a newly minted law-school graduate off to Indonesia with her best friend (Billie Lourd) for a little post-grad Rumspringa before real life begins. And then, something like 37 days later, she's in love — engaged to a local Bali boy (Maxime Bouttier), and ready to shed her career plans for a life as a seaweed farmer's wife.

Cue the parental freakout; soon Georgia and David are on a plane, united in their determination to stop Lily from making their same matrimonial mistakes, even if they can hardly stand to share an armrest. Will they bicker endlessly? With pleasure. Will there be pratfalls and misunderstandings? Uncountable. Might they fall in love all over again? Oh, hush your mouth. Director Ol Parker, who also cowrote the screenplay with Daniel Pipski, is probably best known as the man behind 2018's musical fizz-supreme Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, and he gives Ticket that same kind of Technicolor gloss, minus the spangled jumpsuits and the ABBA soundtrack (though Roberts does seem to wear a lot of rompers here).

The movie's set pieces are stacked with luxe location shots, like Nancy Meyers with a passport, and broad, mugging comedy spills from every scene. Snake bites, lost boats, romantic betrayal; it's all treated with the same weight, which is to say none at all. Emily in Paris star Lucas Bravo is game and très français as Georgia's adoring airline-pilot boyfriend, and Lourd does what she can with a girl whose main character notes seem to be "kooky alcoholic." Bouttier, as Lily's dreamboat fiancé, has dime-sized dimples and few other distinguishing characteristics — though his extended family do get several buoyant scenes, mostly in the service of innocuous culture-clash punchlines.

That leaves Clooney and Roberts to do the heavy lifting on a script that might easily float away without their movie-star force field to hold it in place. The dialogue aims for snappy His Girl Friday-style repartee, though it more often lands on sitcom; the jokes — isn't marriage just a drag? — are calibrated to reach the cheap seats, and so is the sentiment. The pair's chemistry feels more familial than romantic, really, but the power of their twined charisma seems like it should have its own collective noun: a pizzazz of mass appeal, a glamour of enchantment. There's no doubt both actors deserve sharper, less silly material than this, but when they're playing beer pong in a Bali bar and drunkenly pogo-ing to House of Pain's "Jump Around," Paradise is almost, for a moment, a place on Earth. Grade: C+

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