ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — Read our 828reviewsNOW take on “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” starring Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell. Spoiler: the title is misleading in nearly every way.

“A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY” (2025, 109 min., directed by Kogonada)

It is a tragedy that Margot Robbie’s first film role after the blockbuster success of “Barbie” came in the shape of “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” a movie as plastic, candy-colored and artificial as an actual Barbie doll. Robbie stars alongside Colin Farrell, another actor following up a career-best performance – in his case, Martin McDonagh’s terrific 2022 black comedy “The Banshees of Inisherin,” for which Farrell was nominated for an Oscar – with an utter waste of their time and talent.

Make no mistake: “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is anything but.

Directed by Kogonada, the mononymic filmmaker who previously directed Farrell to critical acclaim in the 2021 science-fiction film “After Yang,” “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” was set up to be a slam dunk. A-list talent starring in a colorful, romantic fantasia about hope, healing and second chances, where pivotal sequences involve show tunes and an underbelly of melancholy? I, for one, have tickets to any movie with that description on opening night. The film is even scored by Joe Hisaishi, the composer behind many classic Studio Ghibli movies and consistently one of the top five artists on my Spotify Wrapped.

Instead, I abhorred it.

A long, obnoxious, derivative premise

Farrell and Robbie star as David and Sarah, two singles introduced by mutual friends at a wedding, where, despite their attraction to each other, they have the first of many faux-deep conversations about their resistance to romance. While they ultimately part ways that night, the pair will be corralled together the very next day by “The Car Rental Agency,” an enigmatic company with a garage comprised solely of two 1994 Saturn sedans and a staff made up of an off-kilter Kevin Kline and an F-bomb-loving Phoebe Waller-Bridge doing an inexplicably awful accent.

While CRA appears on the surface to be a, well, car rental agency, it is revealed – gasp! – that they actually specialize in a sort of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” form of memory revisitation. From what the scant, underdeveloped script tells us, the CRA offers sad, lonely people a chance to fall in love by partaking in “a big, bold, beautiful journey,” which is actually an extended road trip dotted with Narnia-esque doors to the passengers’ most regretted memories.

CRA passengers are guided by a talking GPS – voiced by Farrell’s “After Yang” co-star Jodie Turner-Smith – installed in their cars, which, in this case, first leads David and Sarah into an encounter at a Burger King. While scarfing down the remarkably unashamed product placement of their “fast food cheeseburgers,” obnoxious terminology repeated by the characters ad nauseam as though it were charming and twee, the pair recap their conversation at the wedding before saying their goodbyes once more. However – gasp! – the CRA GPS will not allow this, instead shutting down Sarah’s Saturn and directing David to pick her up, their journey thus beginning in earnest.

Doorways to nowhere

The GPS next takes David and Sarah to a mysterious red door on the side of road, the sight of which is met by the two with no more suspicion than a roadside billboard. The door appears to go nowhere, but upon walking through it, the pair are transported into a preserved lighthouse David had previously visited. The sudden teleportation is met with a similar muted concern, though CRA had given no warning about their true “Monsters, Inc.”-style intentions.

What follows – another banal, faux-deep conversation – is itself lighthouse-esque, a scene like a beam illuminating the torment to come for the rest of the endless runtime. Despite their best efforts, Farrell and Robbie sound like aliens attempting to work around screenwriter Seth Reiss’s dialogue. Every line David and Sarah utter is a saccharine cliché, but worse, Reiss appears to be self-aware of this, peppering in R-rated language and jokes at his own characters’ expense like a 14-year-old flirting with a crush. The feelings are genuine; the expression is not.

For example, during their first doorway trip, David remarks to Sarah that “it’s funny how the most beautiful places make you feel the most alone,” a nauseating line played for profundity in the moment.

Later, Sarah mockingly imitates the line, calling it manufactured and rehearsed. While Robbie does an amusingly credible job at replicating Farrell’s accent and delivery, her jab feels entirely out of sync with how the scene was previously presented. Despite these gestures at witty subversiveness, “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is not sardonic whatsoever in tone, making each of Reiss’s immature attempts at undercutting his own saccharine dialogue muddled through Kogonada’s romantic lens.

This happens over and over again. With every door the characters walk through, the audience is treated to a dull, airless slog masquerading itself with bright colors and cheesy quips, and with every door they walk out of, the audience is blessed with a bit of tonal whiplash.

End of the journey

“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is trite all the way through. At its best, it feels like Reiss and Kogonada rifled through a dumpster filled with the table scraps of “Her,” “Eternal Sunshine” and “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.” At its worst, it’s terrifically boring.

The sole scene of the film worth a second of your time is a dazzling performance by Farrell of the opening number of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” However, even this, coupled with multitudinous references to other Broadway shows and the colorful visual cues of “Cherbourg,” even down to umbrellas on the poster, is only a suggestion that “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” might have had a happier life as a stage musical. It certainly doesn’t work as a film.

Kogonada’s latest is destined to take a big, bold, beautiful journey to my list of the worst movies of the year, no GPS required.

Rating: 1/5