Reviews

After working on 2021’s After Yang, Colin Farrell has teamed up with director Kogonada once again for the fantasy romance A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.

The Irish actor plays David, who hires a rental car to attend a wedding, where he meets fellow singleton Sarah, played by Margot Robbie.

After the wedding weekend, David and Sarah get back into their rented cars to return home, However, their unusual GPS (voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith) decides to take them both on “a big bold beautiful journey”, which involves them walking through doors that lead to pivotal moments in their lives, causing them to reflect on what they might do differently this time around.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a really weird and unconventional film that tries to be both a romance and something deeper and more existential. It succeeds on one of these fronts.

The writing around the romance aspect – particularly David and Sarah’s meet-cute – is very poor and cringeworthy, and there is no chemistry between Farrell and Robbie at all. They’re excellent performers, but they just don’t have that spark together.

Thankfully, the film gets progressively better once we learn more about their lives, their history and their relationships, and what happens behind the doors becomes more emotional and meaningful.

The writing for the latter sequences is poignant, thought-provoking and poses some interesting ideas about love, happiness, purpose and family.

But it’s a shame the film takes such a long and slow journey to get to the good stuff. The story is at its strongest in the last 40 minutes – but most people would have switched off by then because the initial setup is poorly written and the first couple of doors are dull.

While Robbie was clearly booked for her box office appeal, she may not have been the best choice for Sarah. Farrell is such a natural fit for his character, and his performance feels so subtle and lived-in that by comparison, she feels like she’s doing too much.

There are a lot of supporting actors to rave about, too, from Lily Rabe to Sarah Gadon and Hamish Linklater. Their screen time is short due to the nature of the project, but they make the most of their parts.

However, Phoebe Waller-Bridge lets the side down with her odd choices for her character. While you have to respect a bold swing, the character’s baffling voice and demeanour did not work and were simply off-putting.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is the definition of a mixed bag – it’s a fairly balanced combination of well-written, excellent moments and poorly-written, awful ones. What a shame that the execution didn’t live up to the intriguing concept.

In cinemas from Friday 19th September.

By Hannah Wales.

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