A Big Bold Beautiful Journey Review
Soulless and almost completely charmless cinema.
The lost David (Colin Farrell) hires a vehicle from a truly strange rental service so that he can attend the wedding of a friend. There, he meets Sarah (Margot Robbie), who also hired a vehicle from the same service. Their love story sputters at the wedding, but en route home the next day, the Sat Nav in their respective cars convinces them to take a big, bold, beautiful journey together - in an effort to see whether they might make the decision to take the incredible risk of a life together.
Directed by Kogonada, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey seemed in its trailer to either be a knock out of the park, break your heart world and space spanning romance, or a complete misfire. Unfortunately, it is the latter.
The film bases itself on a general whimsical air that seems to connect fate and time. Robbie’s Sarah is a manic pixie dream girl type, mixed in with a series of strange, whimsical occurrences starting with a strange car hire. But it never really lets that whimsy fly.
The two leads have next to no chemistry, and the bubbling frission of a love story never gets off the ground. If we’re meant to be enamoured by their will-they, won’t-they dynamic, we’re not; it feels, frankly, dead on arrival. Similarly, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Kevin Kline as the Female Cashier and The Mechanic feel either miscast, or unable to really bridge the gap between the whimsy we should be feeling, and the cringe we find ourselves replacing it with.
Perhaps this isn’t the fault of these performers though. Both Farrell and Robbie are wonderful actors and elevate what is a woeful script. There are few moments of actual, discernible plot to drive forward the romance, and the walk back through their respective lives reveals minor hiccups, rather than anything truly shocking or surprising. The real hamstring here is the script, which loads unbelievable, indefatiguably pretentious dialogue on these performers in a way meant to feel quaint, portentous and cute, but ultimately only feels grating and eye-rolling.
Ultimately, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is perhaps most intriguing for how utterly small, safe and unambitious it winds up being.
