Margot Robbie had audiences cheering and dressing in pink a couple of years ago in Barbie, and after a brief hiatus — during which she had her first baby — she is back and ready to hit the 2025 movie calendar with A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. Colin Farrell co-stars as David who comes together with Robbie’s Sarah for a … well, the title says it all. Ahead of A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’s release date, critics were able to screen the romantic fantasy, and they seem to agree that something is lacking.
The film, directed by Kogonada, is highly anticipated as Margot Robbie’s first role post-Barbie, and she’s described it as “one of the most magical experiences of my life.” Are critics feeling the magic? IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio is decidedly not, as he gives the movie a D+, calling it “embarrassingly earnest and sentimental” and saying the leads have as much chemistry as two walls that happen to be facing each other. Lattanzio continues:
There’s certainly nothing romantic about a movie that features multiple moments of cringe-in-your-seat Burger King product placement. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is miscalculated as a romance and a fantasy, and while I’m loath to blame a craftsman as intelligent as Kogonada entirely for the outcome, he did, after all, agree to direct this lousy script. A big, bold, beautiful bore indeed.
Brian Truitt of USA TODAY rates it 2 out of 4 stars, saying the premise looks good on paper, but the movie loses its interesting story material when it goes all in on Sarah and David’s romance. Don’t feel bad about skipping this one, Truitt says, writing:
It’s an intriguing premise with potential that craters in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, a bland and predictable romantic fantasy with A-list stars Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie. Plenty charming on their own but lacking that spark as a pair, they play strangers inexplicably brought together in magical fashion to examine their past lives together. It’s the kind of thing you’d bet would be emotionally manipulative – if only, because that'd be welcome compared to this emotionally disconnecting, sporadically nuanced narrative.
Witney Seibold of SlashFilm gives A Big Bold Beautiful Journey 4.5 stars out of 10, saying it's not a terrible film, but it's not mature enough to understand the machinations of the human heart. The critic says:
Robbie and Farrell are both excellent actors, but they're saddled with characters who cannot feel so much as posit and query their own emotional states like aliens with scalpels. The film's conversations about love feel academic, theoretical, and inconclusive. There is no fire, no heat, no passion. This is a romance of the brain. Big Bold knows the emotional vocabulary of a jilted teen, but not the fiery inner romantic furnace of a passionate, sexual adult. To paraphrase Raquel S. Benedict, everyone is big bold and beautiful, and no one is horny.
Pete Hammond of Deadline says the bones of a classic love story are there, but the heart just isn’t beating enough. Hammond says he “really wanted to like this one a lot more than I did,” and continues:
Director Kogonada is going for alternate melancholy and whimsy, an uneven blend of introspective drama and high concept fantasy that feels a bit lost in translation and doesn’t quite work the way it was intended for some reason. Something seems to be missing in this very deliberately slow paced reflection on the pitfalls of the past and the possibilities of the future. It connects occasionally, especially in the high school sequence which livens things up considerably, but too often it fails to engage and is overly talky.
Mae Abdulbaki of ScreenRant rates it a 4 out of 10, calling it “a study in manufactured sentimentality.” The critic says A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a “long, arduous” film that will leave audiences feeling hollow. Abdulbaki continues:
The entire film is set up to evoke heartache, loneliness, and the fear of starting a new relationship, but it dawdles when attempting to genuinely capture any of these feelings. It so often feels as sterile as the hospital Sarah visits to see her mother (Lily Rabe). There’s an emptiness that permeates the film; it’s meant to bring us into the fantasy of the romance it’s portraying, not leave us on the outskirts looking in. Even the payoff isn’t as deep as it aims to be.
These reactions are no doubt disappointing for those who were excited to see Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie come together in her return to the big screen. However, don’t let critics keep you from the theater if this is one you’re interested in. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey hits theaters on Friday, September 19.
