A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

Grade: C-

The two biggest releases of the weekend are bad for both similar and opposite reasons. Him throws an awful lot of sound and fury at us. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is mechanical, passive, and doesn’t make much noise. Both made me think “oh, it’s one of those,” but in different ways. Him is the better of the two, but I disliked both. It’s a tale of two shitties.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is like an uneventful Charlie Kaufman screenplay (with a Truman Show element) mixed with an annoying version of It Ends With Us. The leads are played by likable Academy Award nominees Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie. We learn little to nothing about their jobs or current lives. They don’t get to live or breathe or have their own feelings, except for those necessary to the plot. They are puppets dropped in on the movie, put on this odyssey.

They play David and Sarah, who “meet cute” at the wedding of a mutual friend. Their rental cars are from the same company. I can’t wait to tell you more about that in a minute, but on the way back home the next day, Sarah’s car breaks down. David’s GPS is omniscient, much like the airport announcer in What Happens Later, another apt comparison. It tells him “pick up Sarah.”

The navigation system directs them to pull off the road to various random places. Each destination spot has a door, usually not attached to any building. When you walk through it, you are taken back in time to a significant life event from your past. Sometimes you are yourself. Sometimes you are your parent or friend talking to your younger self. Sometimes you’re invisible to everyone, just watching it play out, Christmas Carol style. David and Sarah get to relive many things, and we see how what happened shapes them. Despite them being surprisingly casual about this phenomenon with the doors, a few of the vignettes are the most interesting part of the movie. My favorite was when David was back to starring in his high school musical again – playing J. Pierrepont Finch in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Can we get a movie musical with Colin Farrell? He’s got the chops.

Otherwise, it grows thin and gets extremely tiresome as we are forcefully transported from one dramatic beat to the next. It’s worth acknowledging this bizarre rental car company – a secondary plot point that some reviews have neglected to mention, but I will never forget it, due to how bonkers it is. Two people are running it from a cavernous warehouse. They sit at a table while a video camera films the prospective renters of their vehicles. They are lit up by a spotlight like it’s a film or TV audition. The characters are credited as simply “Female Cashier” and “The Mechanic,” and are played by two actors I like very much: Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Kevin Kline. 

There are millions of unknown actors auditioning like crazy, just trying to get thrown a bone and get their name out there – and they had to give this role (that could have been played by anybody) to a respected, established Oscar winner with decades of lauded work. This is the most overqualified and wasted casting I’ve ever seen. He is responsible for the biggest unintentionally funny movie moment of the year, when he shows up randomly at a hotel to give Robbie and Farrell news about their car. You’ll know the line. The film tries very hard to be so many things (funny, smart, cute, Spielbergian), and fails at every single one. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a poor plodding pretentious journey.

Grade: C-