104 min | PG-13 | October 21, 2022 | Universal Pictures
Two divorced parents who can’t stand each other fly to Bali to stop their daughter from marrying a man she just met. The catch is they have to work together to do it. The scenery is gorgeous and the stars are charming and you will forget all of it by the time you reach the parking lot.
Georgia and David Cotton hate each other. They divorced years ago and have spent the time since perfecting their mutual contempt. Their daughter Lily graduates law school, flies to Bali to celebrate, and decides to marry a seaweed farmer she met days earlier. The exes call a truce and fly to Indonesia with a single shared goal. They want to sabotage the wedding and save their daughter from the mistake they think she is making. The film is a reunion tour for two movie stars dressed up as a story about whether love is worth the risk of failure.
George Clooney plays David as a man who weaponizes charm to hide that he never stopped paying attention. He delivers every insult with a grin that takes the sting out and puts the chemistry in. Julia Roberts plays Georgia with brittle confidence and a laugh she deploys like a defense. The two of them trade barbs on a flight, get drunk at a card game, and lose a phone in the ocean, and the scenes work because Clooney and Roberts have done this dance for decades. Kaitlyn Dever plays Lily with more spine than the script gives her, and Maxime Bouttier plays Gede with a calm decency that makes the central romance more grounded than the one the movie cares about. Billie Lourd plays Wren as the perpetually hungover best friend, a one-note role she squeezes for every laugh.
Ol Parker directs from a script he wrote with Daniel Pipski, and he shoots Bali like a tourism board commissioned it. The camera lingers on infinity pools and beach sunsets and rice terraces until the location becomes the third lead. The production swaps actual Bali for Queensland and the substitution shows in the too-perfect resort geography. Parker stages the comedy in wide, sunlit two-shots that give his stars room to perform, and he cuts on their reactions rather than the jokes. The result looks expensive and feels weightless. Nothing in the frame suggests these people could actually lose anything.
The film knows exactly what it is and refuses to be anything more. It exists to put Clooney and Roberts in beautiful clothing in a beautiful place and let them flirt their way to an ending you can see from the opening scene. The pleasures are real and the stakes are nonexistent. Every obstacle dissolves on schedule and every character arrives where the genre demands. This is a vacation, not a movie, and it never pretends otherwise.