Is the old-fashioned Hollywood movie star making a comeback?
This year we've seen Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum and Brad Pitt drive modest, non-franchise star vehicles to unlikely box office success, their presence endearing otherwise mediocre films to audiences presumably longing for a return to adult movies in the age of Disney-Marvel dominance.
And then there's Tom Cruise, whose stardom – albeit tethered to the shiny fuselage of a legacy franchise – continues to defy Hollywood's laws of career gravity.
The thesis gets its biggest test this week with the return of two of the 90s' brightest luminaries, as George Clooney and Julia Roberts reunite for a rom-com that's out to rekindle some of their old magic.
Ticket to Paradise has its eyes firmly set on pleasing an undemanding audience who've aged with its leads, a crowd who're apparently just gagging for a joke about Clooney wearing yoga pants post-sex (not that there's any actual eroticism; Doris Day and Rock Hudson were sexier 70 years ago).
If you've seen the trailer, you probably already know if you're on board.
Stadium-wide smile and silvery charm intact, Roberts and Clooney play Georgia and David, a pair of successful professionals leading defiantly separate lives.
They were once married for five years, but that was 25 years ago. Now they can't stand each other, a fact that the script – by first-time screenwriter Daniel Pipski – goes to repetitive pains to reinforce, though the actors feel more like two office pals playfully razzing each other than a divorced couple harbouring a lifetime of deep resentment.
Their only child, Lily (Booksmart's Kaitlyn Dever), has just graduated college and taken off for Bali, where she falls – as one does – for a dreamy seaweed farmer, a young Balinese guy by the name of Gede (played by the dreamy, non-seaweed-farming Maxime Bouttier).
The kids plan a whirlwind marriage, prompting David and Georgia – who now has a much younger boyfriend (Emily in Paris' hunky-but-dull Lucas Bravo) – to bury the hatchet and fly to Bali to sabotage the marriage. They clearly don't want Lily making the same mistake they did.
That's about the extent of the emotional intrigue in Ticket to Paradise, an amiable but tepid rom-com that knows where it wants to go but has all the spark of a film crafted with a screenwriting software template.
British filmmaker Ol Parker, who directed Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, must have seemed like an easy go-to for a mild-mannered movie about families squabbling on a resort island, and sure enough, he understands the assignment – lots of sweeping helicopter shots approaching tourist-pretty shorelines, over-lit TV staging, and limply executed comic beats that struggle to overcome an already flat screenplay.
The choice to set the story in Bali – though the production was actually shot on Queensland's Whitsunday Islands – is a curious one, as though the filmmakers hoped their aging stars might pop against a generic tropical backdrop, their retro celebrity untroubled by anything resembling contemporary reality.
Certainly neither Roberts nor Clooney are about to be threatened by Kaitlyn Dever, whose talent is wasted on a thinly conceived character without much in the way of personality or charm. It's a wonder why Gede falls for her at all – her only discernible character trait is that she's an aspiring lawyer – but then again, the easygoing French-Indonesian actor is rarely called upon to do much other than look hot. (Something he admittedly does very well.)
Much like Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum's adventure romp The Lost City, there's a vague sense of exoticism to the whole affair, with the locals mostly relegated to comic support, and some borderline racist gags about non-English languages being hard to understand and ancient customs being weird, or something. (Shout-out to Agung Pindha as Gede's dad, Wayan, landing some of the biggest laughs with some of the film's sketchiest material).
The film's escapades – the parents stealing the wedding rings, CGI dolphins snapping at Clooney's crotch, a cursed temple – un-spool with all the effectiveness of a punchy trailer left to drag out in slow-motion, while the thawing relationship between the leads is strictly by the numbers, which wouldn't be an issue if there'd been a hint of chemistry on screen.
But as charming as they are, Clooney and Roberts can only do so much with a screenplay that boasts lines like "My hangover has a hangover," nor rescue a film that doesn't know how to tangle with their star personae in interesting ways.
Clooney has cultivated a more contemplative dramatic presence in recent work, but he feels rusty in the rhythms of comic banter here, his smugness on full display minus the charm.
Roberts, meanwhile – whose sparkling rapport with her co-star was a highlight of Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's films – seems more brittle than buoyant.
They're both coasting – pleasant for a while, until you start wanting more… (The one exception, a drunken dance-off around a game of beer pong, is pretty entertaining, depending on how you feel about hearing mouldy 90s pop hits wheeled out for the 6 billionth time.)
It's only really Billie Lourd, playing Lily's college BFF Wren, who manages to rupture the staid writing through the force of her unruly screen presence – to be sure, it's little more than a line-reading here or a gesture there, but it's enough to suggest she's inherited her mother's rom-com scene-stealing powers.
In one scene, Wren – thus far unlucky in finding a man of her own on the island – approaches David in a late night bar, and for a moment, it seems like there's going to be a strange, narrative-up-ending flirtation.
It's just the sort of thorny thread that Nancy Meyers might have toyed with, but here it goes unexplored. (I don't think there was a scene in this film where I wasn't thinking, "I wish Nancy Meyers was directing this.")
The anxieties of aging and emotional regret are all there on screen, but they're so neatly packaged that the performers seem to be going through the motions – a shame, when you consider the rich screen history Clooney and Roberts have, and how a more curious filmmaker might have played with their iconography.
"Maybe I'm too old to feel young anymore," says Georgia late in the film, one of the few moments – the quieter, more reflective ones – that register, allowing Roberts the room to unwind away from the forced comedy. (And where Cher needed to arrive on a helicopter to give her a swift rebuttal.)
Instead of doubling down on those vagaries, Ticket to Paradise serves up a final freeze-frame moment straight out of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – surely one of the strangest endings for any middling rom-com destined to be enjoyed on your in-flight neighbour's seat-screen with the sound switched off.
It's an unintentional moment of such existential dread that you'd swear Jean-Luc Godard, in one final act of playful subversiveness, had jammed the digital file to leave us with a lasting image of the end of cinema.
Ticket to Paradise is in cinemas now.
