A Different Kind of Horror: “Ticket to Paradise” (2022)

I will preface less than complimentary reviews with some variation of the sentence “No one sets out to make a bad movie” from now until I quit writing reviews or until I quit watching movies that suck. I will do so because it is, for the most part, true. There are exceptions where filmmakers haven’t cared whether a film is good or not or where the goal has been to make a bad movie. “Cannibal Apocalypse” comes to mind. A variety pack of trash I’ve seen where it’s painfully obvious that no one gave a shit (I bought a four DVD set of Direct to Video garbage shot in New Jersey and Pennsylvania that I wish I still had just to show people; no, I don’t remember any of the titles and mercifully I remember very little of any of the “films” themselves except that one - I shit you not - literally had handmade signs describing what the set was supposed to be; “Gas Station”, for instance…) also lingers.

Then there are just plain lazy flicks that I detest because they are just that - lazy. All of Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison films that I have seen fall into this category. These films are populated with strong talent but hobbled by half-assed scripts, poorly thought out, if at all, and essentially that exist to give Sandler and his pals home movies. Some of Kevin Smith’s oeuvre falls into this category, as well, but I am willing to go easier on Smith because he at least tries to do something different. Still, Kevin Smith still has yet to really apply himself to understanding directing in some instances (and that baffles me, but this is for another time.)

Then you have things like “Ticket to Paradise” which, by any metric, should yield comedic gold. Julia Roberts and George Clooney as bickering ex-spouses uniting their efforts to torpedo their daughter’s surely poorly thought-out decision to get married to a seaweed farmer in Bali after only knowing him a few weeks should have resulted in screwball comedy magic. Maybe it would have, had it been scripted well. Ol Parker does not have my vote of confidence as a director or a writer but this endeavor tarnishes my sense of Roberts and Clooney’s perception of what passes for comedy. Yeah, “Burn After Reading” this ain’t.

Two of the last genuine Movie Stars who pretty much breathe charisma like rainbows should be coming out of their nostrils play two of the most self-absorbed, stupid, pointless characters ever to show up on screen. Mind you, I am not of the school that characters have to be likable to be engaging, to hold the attention, or to challenge us. Travis Bickle and Michael Corleone come to mind. In the current case, I would pay for two mob executions by the latter of these two dimbulbs. 

Roberts plays Georgia, an art dealer formerly married to David (Clooney), an architect. From the first moment we see them, they snipe at each other like children and not particularly bright ones. At issue, is that they’re daughter Lily (Kaitlyn Dever, so good in “Booksmart”) has met and fallen in love with Gede (Maxime Bouttier) while visiting Queensland, Australia-cum-Bali. Her best friend Wren (Billie Lourd, who deserves so much better) is with her and provides, possibly, the only semblance of a grounded performance or a recognizable human being in the film.

I won’t belabor the issue about the tedium that sets in early and stays all the way through as two usually charming actors turn in bafflingly stupid performances. IF (and it’s a big one) the film was pitched to them as a “classic screwball comedy”, they were lied to. Both Roberts and Clooney go broad and Christ on toast if I just wished they’d gone home. Placing them at the center of the film was the first operational error. Two godawful abysses for human beings that overstayed their welcome in the first ten minutes of the film sucked the air out of the room enough that I wondered if this is really a veiled “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” theme. Their daughter graduates from Law School and they turn the graduation ceremony into a drawn-out oneupsmanship sequence lacking any bite, charm, or wit because it is, frankly, humiliating watching two grown-ups debase themselves unsupported by any other likewise broad or biting sequence to make it land.

It isn’t even “cringey”. Cringe comedy works only when the stakes are high enough to care about or we care enough for the recipients of the cringe to feel some degree of empathy (for anyone). In “Ticket to Paradise”, none of this exists. 

Because Georgia and David are such driveling fools, you cannot really give two turds’s worth of concern for them. Because Lily is so half-assed sketched out, you aren’t given much to connect with. She’s finished four years of law school and we know she’s worked hard (because law school is hard and because Wren, her best friend says she never parties - God, make it stop) and she has two infantile people for parents. Normally, this last bit of information might help us sympathize and we do, somewhat, but Devers is absolutely given nothing to work with.

By contrast, Clooney and Roberts are given everything to work with, but it is shit. 

That they decided to team up to curtail their daughter’s nuptials is so goddamned stupid I felt like plunging nine inch nails into my frontal lobes before the movie got to me. Then I realized, it’s too stupid to cause any lasting damage.

To be sure, both of our leads have done less than stellar work across their careers, but never to the point where I began to question if “Mystic Pizza”, “Pretty Woman”, “Out of Sight”, or “Michael Clayton” were just flukes. Should Roberts be forced to give back her Oscar for “Erin Brockovich” might be excessive, but I would understand why. 

I began to wonder if the Body Snatcher idea was really at the heart of this. If that were the case, it would mean that their behavior prior to the invasion must have been just as idiotic because to Lily this is how they act normally. I think maybe that looked at from another perspective, what we have is a genuine tragedy. Two people, two parents who exist somewhere on a spectrum of an as yet undiagnosed pathology and plagued with some kind of dementia. The movie then begins to work.

However, according to the various interviews, and the marketing, and what IMDb says, this is a comedy. 

To me, it is very much a horror movie. Upon landing in Australia Bali, they steal the wedding rings successfully but these are replaced, David has tried to sow doubts in Gede’s mind about Lily getting bored and wanting more. Clooney’s dumbass suggests a visit to a cursed site on the island and Lily and Gede essentially, just walk away, deflating any sense of suspense, so absent are stakes in this idiotic fever dream. Paul (don’t ask who he is - comic relief/Georgia’s young French suitor and they pilot who flew the plane they were on to get to Bali/doesn’t matter) shows up and proposes to Georgia and just adds another layer of dumbass to the proceedings and of course, you know that eventually, the kids discover the parents’ duplicity and what we have known altogether too long: they are hideous assholes.

I asked myself many questions but one that I didn’t want to go into was how both would hold onto their daughter, tell her they loved her, and then try to fuck up her marriage overseas to a man she loves, and into whose family she has been unconditionally accepted? It may not be “Saw”, but there is a kind of emotional torture going on here. It may not be “Gaslight”, but how could she trust either of them when both could act so reprehensibly?

However, even as a horror film, it cannot completely work because no one seems to get upset, really, about the parental malfeasance, thereby defusing any sense of dramatic tension. Or anything. There is not a moment of believability, much less, authenticity to the performative or the premise of the whole shooting match. 

It is limp. Nothing lands. Nothing lands because there is nothing and no one to care about. In that sense, it could be almost Sartrean in its denial to give us characters to care about. Wren seems to be the only person around with any sense of life and even then, she may have found the entire enterprise so mind-numbing that she gets hammered repeatedly. Can you blame her? She has a heart to heart with David that we assume is - like other scenes in the film where Clooney or Roberts “open up” (ugh, so much ugh) to humanize him and gives something to “feel” for him and also, Roberts. 

Nope. Too bad. Doesn’t work. It does not work because the script is as thin as the paper it might be printed on. 

Nope. Now there’s a film. However, we are not talking about Jordan Peele’s opus; we are stuck in the mire with middle-aged delinquents who should have restraining orders on them. However (so, so many howevers in this), they would have to be characters of consequence in a plot with consequences, to matter. None of it does.

There is no spoiler needed but suffice it to say that all is well that ends well and just using that cliché shames me bringing anything tangentially related to the Bard in any proximity to this misbegotten affair. However (yet again!), no one cares! 

The ‘rents get on the ferry to catch their flight and having had their rapprochement, hold hands and decide to seize the moment and stay in Bali! Those wacky parents, jumping off the ferry to swim back to the shore and surprise their daughter and new in-laws. It ends with a freeze frame, but in my ending, they would return to the village and when Lily and Gede see them, they both shriek and the film ends with the newlyweds frozen with horrific rictus.

There is one last reading that might save this film. Is it a satire of the toll that late stage capitalism has taken its toll on Boomers with all their entitled hubris and how they see children not as individuals with agency but as mere extensions of their own bloated egos and as commodities to be fought over for ownership? Could that be it? Did I miss the entire subtext? Oddly, the film almost works for me if I read it that way. Clooney and Roberts could be characters in a remake of Buñuel “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”! Yes! I think that could be it! 

I may have found the key to the film and I feel so much better now. Ol Parker (who also wrote and directed “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” and wrote both “Exotic Marigold Hotel” movies (the first one was a pleasant enough diversion and was taken from a novel; the second was meh, at best) is the next Luis Buñuel? No. No, I don’t think so. Particularly, given how regressive it is: Georgia takes responsibility for failing the marriage because she wanted to “find herself”/ have a career and felt the marriage - and we assume, by extension, motherhood - was holding her back.

This last renders it a horror movie. We are in the twenty-first century and despite the political and social hellscape that is the United States, why would a successful woman who does have the love of her daughter ever cop to such retrograde bullshit? (And bullshit is; like a river, bullshit in this movie flows.) It’s all so half-assed and repulsive and for all the verbiage I’ve spent and I have spent far too much, it is void of sentience, sentiment, or anything resembling comedy or tragedy.

Sorry, Ol and company, but this film reeks of flaccidity. It is a somnolent member suffering from dysfunction of script and execution. I would say that it is unfair to Clooney and Roberts but they read the script. They signed off on it and both are executive producers. No, this is crap.

There is nothing to save a shit fest like this. There is such a profound lack of caring on the filmmakers’ parts to provide the semblance of script or tale even somewhat deftly told that it really isn’t horrifying. It’s just horrible.