A still from Ticket To Paradise trailer. (courtesy: Universal Pictures)

Cast: George Clooney, Julia Roberts

Director: Ol Parker

Rating: 2.5 stars (out of 5)

A pair of reuniting Hollywood megastars whose charisma lights up the screen, a picturesque location that yields a stream of hypnotic visuals and a pleasant, if unremarkable, storyline combine to make Ticket to Paradise, directed and co-written by Ol Parker, a breezy, enjoyable romantic comedy while it lasts.

Crammed with a surfeit of cliches and shallow delights, Ticket to Paradise delivers little that could stay etched in our minds forever. However, George Clooney and Julia Roberts, back together on the big screen after a six-year hiatus, help the film tide over its predictable packaging and add up to a near-full complement of fun, frolic and romance.

The two stars, who also serve as the film’s executive producers, strive hard to keep the concoction afloat. They nearly succeed. The duo glides through a film that does not stretch them one bit. In what is but a stroll in the park for the lead pair, they step into the breach every time Ticket to Paradise appears to be drifting out at sea and courting danger.

The backdrop does the rest. Seen through the lens of cinematographer Ole Bratt Birkeland, Bali picture postcard pretty. When Clooney and Roberts turn on the wattage and get in the way of the beguiling scenery, they do take some of the attention away from the splendour of the setting but also serve to appreciably augment its appeal.

One of the younger characters in the film describes Clooney’s steps on the dance floor as “dinosaur moves”. That is an obvious exaggeration. But yes, it isn’t just the occasional hip-swinging, but also the general air of back-patting bonhomie that flows through the film that gives it an old-fashioned feel but in a good, lively sort of the way.

It, of course, takes a whole lot of local arrack and a game of improvised ping-pong – it is modelled on a drinking competition that David and Georgia would indulge in in their youth – to get the two leads into the mood to roll back the years. They do that with some effort to spare.

When we first meet Architect David Cotton (Clooney) and art gallerist Georgia Cotton (Roberts), their short-lived marriage has been dead for two decades. Not only have they have been apart all these years, they also cannot stand the sight of each other. They meet after years at their daughter’s graduation ceremony but show no signs of letting bygones be bygones.

The divorced couple flies to Bali together when they learn that their only daughter Lily (Kaitlyn Dever) is about to marry a man she has just met on the island she is visiting with all-weather friend Wren Butler (Billie Lourd). The girl is a law graduate ready to turn her back on her career even before it has begun. Her parents are sure she deserves better.

The guy Lily has fallen in love with is Balinese seaweed farmer Gede (Maxime Bouttier), an easy-going, handsome young man who, as he figures out quickly, must surmount obstacles that David and Georgia are determined to put in his path.

Expectedly, the film’s focus is not so much on the young lovers as on David and Georgia dealing with a past that they want do not want to reminded of. Georgia’s boyfriend Paul (Lucas Bravo), a commercial pilot who has blue eyes and possesses oodles of charm, lands up in Bali with the intention of proposing to her. Can Georgia summon the ardour of youth and give love another shot? Where does David figure in all this?

The answers that Ticket to Paradise provides may not catch anybody by surprise, but the ups and downs that the older couple encounter as they struggle to keep themselves from bickering and focus on what they are in Bali for – to sabotage their daughter’s relationship with Gede – do keep the audience invested in their fate.

On its way to the climax, the two pairs of lovers in Ticket to Paradise do a great deal of hemming and hawing as the relationships – one has run its course, the other has just begun – have to reckon with weather both fair and foul. The collective impact of the two arcs is anything but even. And that is the film for you – at once anachronistic and with the times.

The two younger actors in the cast – Indonesian-French actor Maxime Bouttier and Kaitlyn Dever – do more than their bit to shore up the film with their youthful presence. As two young people in love negotiating stumbling blocks not of their own making, they add a layer of vitality to Ticket in Paradise that plays off perfectly well with the overwhelming allure that Clooney and Roberts bring to the table.

Lucas Bravo, the actor who played Chef Gabriel in the Netflix series Emily in Paris, is no pushover either. Although he is saddled with what is clearly an underwritten role, he does not allow himself to be swept away by the enormous star power that propels Ticket to Paradise.

Talking about his happy years with Georgia, David says: “When it started out it was unreal. Then it got real.” The reverse is true of Ticket to Paradise. The film starts off in the real world of a man and a woman who have moved on and a young girl preparing for a legal career. It ends in “the most beautiful place on earth”, which presents a romantic, fairy-tale ambience in which improbabilities abound.

Not exactly magical, Ticket to Paradise is a bright and buoyant ride that manages to rustle up its own brand of agreeable miracles what with George Clooney and Julia Roberts turning back the clock and evidently enjoying themselves in the process.