Director: Kogonada
Writer: Seth Reiss
Stars: Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Jennifer Grant
Synopsis: Two strangers who meet at a mutual friend’s wedding have the chance to relive important moments from their pasts, illuminating the path that led them to the present and gaining the opportunity to change their futures.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, one of the most anticipated movies of 2025, is a reminder of the power of a good trailer. While the Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell feature itself plays like an arrogant snooze fest, its sizzling preview teems with hopeful, wondrous possibilities. A fantastical three-minute romp, the trailer feels hopelessly romantic, an immersive trip through nostalgia, brimming with emotional introspection.
Instead, we are treated to a film that is almost arrogantly self-indulgent, borrowing its structure so blatantly from better works that I call it grand theft. The intended subtext of being open to new people, experiences, and love is lost beneath the pedestal on which the script places itself. Frankly, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey provokes more yawns and eye rolls with its cloyingly emotional shmaltz than it does deep, meaningful contemplation.
The story follows David (Farrell), an ordinary man on his way to a wedding. While walking to his car, he chats with his parents on the phone, who remind him to keep himself open to love. They’ve always called him “special,” though he feels anything but. When he reaches his unremarkable sedan, he discovers a wheel clamp on one of the tires. Fortunately, he notices an advertisement for car rentals and decides to take a walk in the nice, soft rain.
Even though he has a cell phone, where he could find a rental car company to come pick him up, he wanders into what looks like an abandoned warehouse, where he meets a sales representative (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who has a penchant for swearing, and a stoic mechanic (Academy Award winner Kevin Kline). When he speaks, his coworker finds him to be utterly fascinating. David, as he should, finds the whole encounter strange.
For one, they have a picture of David that looks like he is auditioning for a Broadway play. How did they get his picture? He doesn’t pursue it, leaving the elephant in the room. The rental car cashier is also incredibly bossy, insisting that David use the rental car’s navigational system instead of relying on his phone’s system. Nevertheless, he carries on and makes it to the wedding, where he catches the eye of Sarah (Robbie), the quintessential manic pixie dream girl—free-spirited, eccentric, and full of spontaneous energy.
A Big Beautiful Journey is from Kogonada, who has become a critical darling with such films as Columbus and After Yang, known for his meditative and meticulously crafted visual spin he puts on minimalist cinema with deeply moving results. Yet, strangely, the third movie in the Kogonada trilogy about human connection and meaning becomes charmless, even though the script is a metaphor for opening yourself up to meaningful emotional intimacy.
The issue is the mismatch between the director and the writer. Written by The Menu’s Seth Reiss, the film, like the characters played by Farrell and Robbie, is a marriage without chemistry, the most straightforward explanation being a studio-arranged union. The redemptive framework is akin to A Christmas Carol, like so many recycled guided-journey movies that usually take place around the holidays.
Here, Reiss’s script has David and Sarah go on a journey led astray by a bossy GPS (voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith), to doorframes in the oddest of secluded places, placing them during essential times in their lives that shaped their behaviors. While the psychology of that is strong—David’s parents (Hamish Linklater, Jennifer Grant) being overindulgent and overpraising, and Sarah’s mother’s (Lily Rabe) illness. The scenes play out as overly manipulative and don’t land with the emotional punch they are intended to, which points to a script, director, and studio not on the same page.
A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey is well-intended, and I wouldn’t dare not be open to an emotionally resonant film, despite what may come across as cinematic critic cynicism. However, Kogonada’s film is like an old cliché of a model—beautiful on the surface, but with little personality and dull, almost naïve, in substance. This is a typical romantic fantasy that will end exactly the way you think, offering little surprises, emotional payoff, and ridiculous product placement. (Yet strangely doesn’t allow any major car rental chain to make an appearance.)
The film’s pretentiousness is fine as long as it elevates the material, but here, the style only diminishes it.
You can watch A Big Bold Beautiful Journey only in theaters September 19th!
