Director: Ol Parker
Starring: George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Kaitlyn Dever, Maxime Bouttier, Billie Lourd, Lucas Bravo
Distributor: Universal Pictures International
Runtime: 104 mins. Reviewed in Sep 2022
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan

| |

Rating notes: Coarse language

This American romantic comedy tells the story of a divorced couple who travel to Bali, Indonesia, to stop their daughter making the same mistake they think they did, years before.

This American film, made by a team of producers, was shot principally in Queensland. Shot primarily on the Whitsunday Islands, the Gold Coast and Brisbane – with the Whitsundays doubling for Bali. Director Ol Parker, who is best known as the director of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018) and as writer of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011), wrote the film’s script with US writer and screenwriter, Daniel Pipski. The film is not to be confused with two movies of the same name, that were released in the early 1960s.

The film brings David (Clooney) and Georgia (Roberts) together as parents of Lily (Dever) their only daughter, who wants to marry a local Balinese man, Gede (Bouttier). David and Georgia plan to make sure that Lily doesn’t get married to Gede.

They are divorced, and they think their daughter is throwing away her life, just as they think they did in marrying each other, 25 years before. They both feel they married impulsively, and the film’s plot has them travelling to Bali to prevent Lily’s wedding. They want their daughter to dump the man, she says she is in love with.

It is hard to think of two more bankable stars coming together romantically on screen than Clooney and Roberts. Both have won Academy Awards and have a huge film following, and both have enormously distinguished film careers behind them. They previously worked together in a limited number of films that included Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and Oceans Twelve (2004) and they have largely, but not entirely, earned their reputation in excellent crime-comedy films of the 1990s and early 2000s. Pretty Woman (1990) endures as an all-time romantic-comedy classic for Julia Roberts.

Such is the stature of Clooney and Roberts, it is hard to direct a movie which shows one of them stealing the limelight from the other. The film solves this dilemma by the director presenting them as sparring partners, and the film has a sharp, witty script to help to make that possible. Because David and Georgia are united on a common mission to ‘save’ their daughter, the plot quickly establishes the prediction that Lily’s parents will fail, and experience romance once more.

This movie intentionally aims to please, and Clooney and Roberts do what they can to act with calculated charm and guile. The film shows their characters setting aside their bitterness towards each other to combine forces wittily to stop Lily from marrying, which helps to ignite their romantic attraction to each other once more, or maybe yet again.

There is an inevitability about this movie. Both Clooney and Robert’s have natural comedic talent, and they ‘spar’ well, but by virtue of the fact one never completely outmanoeuvres the other, the film fails to rise to dramatic heights. It stays a little thinly at the level of an entertaining comedy that engages two talented, gracefully ageing, cinema stars, who work well together.

This is a straight-down-the-line romantic comedy built to please, where romance blooms for David, Georgia and Lily, in an exotic scenic location, that is gorgeously photographed.