Review: ‘Ticket to Paradise’ has Julia Roberts and George Clooney, and that’s enough
“Ticket to Paradise” was a good idea for Julia Roberts and George Clooney to collaborate on, even if the film was not as well executed as its marketing might have us believe.
In a rare outing for a film made by so-called independent filmmakers, the film “Ticket to Paradise” stars Roberts and Clooney together as the two very different characters in the same movie. But it looks like the collaboration was ill-advised to begin with.
Clooney is the one trying to get away from the law for his own personal gain, while Roberts has taken refuge in the arms of the legal system instead of trying to break through. But the two characters have their differences, and it is in that sense that makes this such a remarkable project.
The idea was to follow the plight of two people in different ways. Clooney plays a former gangster (or former husband) who has been wrongly imprisoned on false testimony, while Roberts plays a young woman who has recently been wrongfully convicted. It is hard to decide which of the two stories is more compelling.
In one case, the man has come up short, yet he can still go down. Now that he is free, he’s trying to make his life (and he) right again. But the fact is, in both stories our hero and heroine have something to fight for, and they’re two young people who can make it happen.
This is not to denigrate Clooney’s performance here. It was very, very good and he’s such a convincing actor — he’s played the same kind of character (in a career that’s spanned several decades) that he will be able to pull off convincingly for this role.
However, we don’t trust Roberts. In the film version, she’s the one who comes up short, and she’s the one who wants to get out of prison. We have no idea why she’d want to do that. Clooney wants to stay in prison, so why didn’t he just take matters into his own hands instead of coming up with the brilliant idea of getting out of prison?
Roberts also seems to have some kind of moral ambiguity that clooney doesn’t have. Clooney always seems to be
