It’s wonderful that Rick and Ilsa will always have Paris.
For the same reason, it’s really great that Julia Roberts will always have Notting Hill (1999) and George Clooney will always have One Fine Day (1996).
Both Roberts and Clooney should forget they once bought tickets to paradise.
Your humble fillum reviewer first critiqued Ticket to Paradise, based solely on the film’s trailer, in September last year when it first hit cinema screens. He proudly thinks that’s the first time a review has ever been conducted that way, and he came up with a rating shown above, based on the sad assumption – the very sad assumption – that if the best parts of the rom-com were in that trailer, it was a sad day indeed for these two fine actors. Back then the film boasted that it was “only in cinemas”! It’s a real shame it didn’t stay there.
Having now watched the whole sorry exercise on Netflix, I can come back to Sandra Hall’s quote in that first review that it was surprising that the two megastars had never made a film of this genre before together. Let me add the hope they never repeat the process.
Ticket to Paradise is not a shocker but it’s not much of a 104 minute time waster either.
The storyline suggests the writers had a spare afternoon with fuck all to do, some of the dialogue is corny and the ending pays homage more to the cheesy, feel-good Hallmark Channel template for such projects than treating viewers with some respect.
Indeed, the same story with unknown actors and a better director might have generated some warmth between the two main characters. Roberts and Clooney here display all the chemistry of a half-eaten bowl of cold porridge. Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn would be spinning in their graves.
Your reviewer has a little list of fillums that fit under the category of “Gawd, I hope this is not the last movie these two ever made!” It includes the 2017 flick, Our Souls at Night, with Robert Redford and Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas and Dianne Keaton in And So It Goes in 2014.
It was with a great sigh of relief from me that IMDB shows that Roberts has two new projects under way and Clooney has one.
Salvation, hopefully, is at hand for both.
Don Gordon-Brown
FROM THE ARCHIVES:
The Bug Online 