Review: ‘Ticket to Paradise’ has Julia Roberts and George Clooney, and that’s enough to get me
This summer, Universal is hoping to turn Julia Roberts’s $8 million divorce settlement from Bruce Willis into a summer blockbuster that could get people talking. They’re aiming to put together an adaptation of Stephen Brust’s 1993 novel that will star Clooney, and that’s only the beginning—the film is called “Ticket to Paradise,” as if the plot of the novel will have anything to do with this summer’s hottest movie rental destination.
The plot, such as it is, is simple. One week before the start of the summer, a famous actress falls from the sky after being hit by lightning, and she lands about two miles shy of a cliff. In the past, she had been known as a fashion model, but after a recent accident, she is now a complete wreck. Her first instinct is to climb back up to the cliff’s edge hoping to get some fresh air, with the help of her friends (Catherine Zeta Jones, James Caan, and William H. Macy), but she doesn’t make it. Instead, she falls into a gorge, and it’s up to a group of survivalists (a group of women, in case that sounds a little sexist) to rescue her—which they do—with the help of a local town and a few animals (a dog, a cat, and a pig). In order to get a free ticket to paradise, they have to get there first.
At the end of “Ticket to Paradise,” you do not get a free ticket, and you do not find out how it turns out. Instead, you are left to experience this summer blockbuster on your own. It’s exactly what you want.
In the end, I did not get a free ticket. But I did learn something about Julia Roberts and her relationship with Bruce Willis from this movie. I learned that they are very good friends, and she did not like this script at all. And they are as different in real life as they are in this movie. They are two very different people.
The movie starts with Julia Roberts’s character getting high on painkillers, and it goes on until she decides the best way to get high is to crash a car she