REVIEW: ‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’ Takes the Road to Nowhere

With its dazzling and emotive score from frequent Studio Ghibli collaborator Joe Hisaishi and the keen eye of filmmaker Kogonada behind the camera, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey makes one question one’s own perception of taste. In theory, this is precisely what we (re: I) look for in filmmaking: big, bold, original stories told by directors with artful visions and led by actors of a certain caliber emoting with effusive sensitivity.

Here is a film that wears its thunderous heart on its sleeve, that believes in the transformative power of love and seeks to deliver a story as overwhelmingly earnest musical numbers, as dreamy as rainy day confessions, and as transportive as a night spent under the stars. Instead, we’re left with the mere blueprints of a better story, a mess of would-haves and could-haves. 

When you break A Big Bold Beautiful Journey into parts, it feels unfathomable to reconcile how much of an unmitigated disaster it is. The kind where, minutes into the over-lit and oversaturated opening sequence, you can’t help but think “oh no, what happened here.” There’s a certain immediate charm to the offbeat, storybook-like cadence of this reality, where the absurd isn’t so much questioned by the characters but responded to with curiosity. But the charm extinguishes itself the moment the story gains momentum. 

Written by Sam Reiss (The Menu) and directed by Kogonada (After Yang, Pachinko), the film follows David (Colin Farrell), who we first meet while on his way to a wedding. His car has gotten the boot, leading him to The Rental Car Company, setting him off on an unlikely jaunt of hijinks and romantic meet-cutes. Arriving at the wedding, burnt by the rain drenched sunny day, he meets Sarah (Margot Robbie), our first true-blue manic pixie dream girl in ages, though with a modern twist. She gets to have her own backstory and demons separate from the male leads. So, that’s one win. 

Don’t look for passion between Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie. 

Their first meeting is a torrent of miscommunication and overcommunication. David tries hitting on her, but she passes him by. Hours later, she asks him to marry her after talking about being a monster. And thus is built the main dynamic and romance of the film, one built on slight untruths, self-deprecating declarations, and proof that no matter how attractive the star, sometimes chemistry can’t be manufactured. Look for any heat between Farrell and Robbie, and you’ll come up empty. 

And here lies one of the first, most critical ailments of A Big Bold Beautiful Journey: its abrasive artifice. As the two decide to take part in an impromptu, GPS-provoked journey together, it’s hard to care because we know nothing about these characters. We still know nothing by the end of their journey, too, even after they’ve passed through so many mysterious doors along the way that detail the DNA of their lives – their loves and losses and public humiliations. 

For a film that is meant to capture the wondrous, inexplicable beauty and connections of life, the result is exhaustive in how emotionally barren it is. There’s little to no heart. In some ways, it makes sense because there’s a cynic’s edge to the film as characters seek contentedness over strict, fairytale happiness. But the writing doesn’t match the flourish of the direction or the sweeping Hisaishi score. This is meant to be a Big and Bold film. So why does it feel so inconsequential and flighty? 

A lack of intent creates a distinct lack of tension. 

There’s a sentiment in life often relayed about how it’s about the journey, not the destination. And that is true in life, where how we get to any certain X is just as important, just as informative to our character, as to what we finally achieve. But the destination does, crucially, matter too. What are you striving towards or working for? A Big Bold Beautiful Journey fails to find intent. We get the vaguest sense of grief and loneliness propelling David and Sarah forward, but there’s never a clear end goal or desire. Simply two souls traversing the wandering days of life together. 

Most frustratingly, there’s a version of this film that works. But the edits would be immense. That, or it would require a total tonal overhaul. Get a pair of directors like the Wachowskis in here for something over-the-top and laden with artery-line hits of volcanic emotional eruption. Or, rather, echo the subtlety of Kogonada’s own work, like Columbus, and let the characters and the tremendous actors at the forefront quietly bear the brunt, with the world around them a mere aberration of their current mental states. 

On paper, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a dream of a project with its larger-than-life scenarios and original screenplay. But it’s the clunky, robotic script from Reiss that is the film’s greatest undoing. A true, seemingly unsalvageable catastrophe, the script strips any good grace earned by the visuals or performances. There isn’t a single line in the film that is demonstrative of how humans talk to one another. In some ways, this feels deliberate, to the point where it tries to give the film leeway before it ruins the moment with unnecessarily convoluted plotting or quips that lead straight into increasingly on-the-nose needle drops. 

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is reminiscent of the best misses and triumphs of the 2000s. 

Farrell does his very best to do something with the material, bringing with it his requisite twinkle and mischievousness. He even manages to bring in some much needed heaviness in moments where he must reckon with the decisions that lead him to his current placement in life. In his refined performance, he finds pockets of depth that go unexplored, the script favoring the louder, declarative moments over those of real humanity. 

Robbie, meanwhile, has never been worse. Granted, she’s dealt a terrible hand. The film so desperately wants her to be a significant personality, someone who can steer David in the right direction while she also grapples with her own demons. She’s “bad with men,” she says, and a “monster,” and yet those statements ring hollow to the point of silliness after spending less than a minute with her character, though not quite as much when Sarah declares herself and David “dorks,” because they like musical theater, just of of the truly laughable moments where the script fails to read the room. 

In the most forgiving angle, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is reminiscent of mid-aught classics and duds, where romance narratives were big-scale and sincere. Films such as Garden State, Elizabethtown, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, and more. Films where romance was the jumping point and missed connections led to greater, tumbling stories of finding oneself through the company of another. Usually, a dude finding himself through the whims and whimsy of a manic-pixie-dream-girl.

Kogonada can do better and hopefully will again soon. But with his own script. 

With the unforgivable needle drops (the use of “First Days of My Life” by Bright Eyes is abhorrent), undergrad theater-kid style nonsense, and the stiff performance of one of its leads, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey was never going to be a masterpiece. But it might’ve been salvageable if not for a script that clearly needed more passes through. As it is, it’s a half-story, more concerned with montages and snapshots than building out a story with a narrative, a point, and real characters to embody it. 

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey fails to sustain itself from the moment go. It’s weird but not weird enough, a romance without a fleeting moment of chemistry or tension between the leads. The film is bright and vibrant but lacks the grandiosity necessary to sweep us along.

There’s cynicism that lacks bite, and heart that refuses to beat or bleed. The film aspires to be big, bold, and beautiful, but it remains too shy, too reluctant to delve deeper, strive for greatness, or reach farther to achieve its full potential. It speaks of a grand journey, but can’t muster up the confidence to go there. What a shame. It would’ve been nice to see a film that understood the pull and delivered something unmistakably magical. 

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey arrives in theaters September 19.