Review: ‘Ticket to Paradise’ has Julia Roberts and George Clooney, and that’s enough
By Stephen Christy · March 6, 2010
The opening credits in Ticket to Paradise, (PG-13, $20 million) show Julia Roberts as a 20-ish-year-old blonde named Julia Roberts. A man walks in behind her and says, “Hello, Julia.” She looks at him and says, “Why, hello, Mr. Gage.” He goes on, “I was told that you might be able to help me, and I hope you can.”
“I’m here to help,” she replies. This is the first line of dialogue every woman in a movie needs to be able to recite verbatim from memory without a single mistake.
But that’s not the beginning of the movie. As Julia, Roberts plays a flier who dies in a crash because she refused to go off-base on a mission that had a 20 percent chance of success. She says, “My buddy’s already dead and all I want is to get away from this godforsaken land, and go home to the island and live.”
But Julia can’t go home to her island because this is a movie about an island, and in the middle of it is a man who can take her there. (Don’t worry, he’s a man.)
Clooney plays the man, and he’s a kind of island pirate character, sort of the guy who makes the love-of-yours-life-and-the-land-where-you-have-all-you-ever-wanted fantasies that have been all too easy to come by in the real world.
George Clooney’s character, Gage, is a kind of hero. He’s a man who’s been on tough calls. His only way out of a tough situation is to grab his wife and kid, and go somewhere where he has