“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” (2025) is a meet cute with a catch between David Longley (Colin Farrell) and Sarah Miles (Margot Robbie) who decide to go on an adventure together thanks to an interactive GPS that takes them to doors in various beautiful locations. They explore formative memories, experience the past path that they never traversed and face their biggest character flaws. Will this journey help them overcome whatever made them believe that being single was their only option and embrace a chance to be together? Though incredibly heavy-handed in the vein of “The Life of Chuck” (2025), the two leads and Kogonada’s direction make it a better alternative and infuse it with the occasional poignant moment.
The story mainly follows Farrell, and the man would make reading from a telephone book sound profound. “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” wisely pokes fun at this ability to disarm any attempt at criticism. With his parents predominantly defining him, David is a thin character. At forty-nine years old and as attractive as the real-life father of two sons is, it strains disbelief that David cannot even kind of stick the landing on having a serious relationship. People working with less have backed into more. The reason is revealed gradually through the course of the movie: family history and initial literal and metaphorical heart breaks. Slowly David lost that theater kid energy, which is the underlying engine fueling the magical realism. The power of the theater as a supernatural force fuels second chances at love complete with a liminal black box theater to process each vignette.
Of course, David is willing to try his hand at love for Sarah because have you seen the thirty-five-year-old Robbie, the live-action Barbie able to attain unrealistic beauty standards even while pregnant with her first child during the shooting “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” which may explain why a brown velvet dress looked more like a sack than any of the other outfits. Sarah warns David off because she is a heartbreaker. The lady doth protest too much because she is as into him as he is into her. Sarah’s villain origin story actually feels grounded in the real world and her denouement scene with Lily Rabe, who plays Sarah’s mother and dominates Sarah’s journey whether on or offscreen, sticks the landing in a way that the romance does not. Anyone familiar with Kogonado’s first and best film, “Columbus” (2017), will not be surprised. He is one of the few male artists who is better at depicting relationships between mothers and daughters than any other variation of relationships.
“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is a nice concept: getting to know a plausible significant other’s real self and straighten up all your crap so your future, final relationship can stand a chance to survive self-sabotage. While some of the vignettes feel like an acting exercise, it also resembles a counseling exercise called the empty chair technique with role reversal for David. Because it is an experimental concept that feels more theoretical than real, the story can feel endless and remote. Also, the math does not always add up, especially for David, though the end result of their prior relationship issues will resonate. Writer Seth Weiss wants a hard-earned romance that can stick to the bones, but it is miles away from “The Baltimorons” (2025), which is far more realistic, uses improv as a metaphor for creating life with a partner and more plausibly flawed. Despite the Rube Goldbergian efforts to put this couple through their paces, it feels like predestination.
The disembodied door in a surreal landscape recently featured in “Pandemonium” (2024) about people entering the afterlife. Despite all the rain, fire and dead people, “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is stubbornly upbeat, which means that despite the characters’ words of self-condemnation, isolation and existential crisis, there is no convincing suspense that these people would remain in their respective dark night of the soul. Kogonada does the heavy lifting after their initial meeting, and they go to their respective hotel rooms clearly still thinking of each other, close, but far apart. It felt like an homage to Pedro Almodovar’s “Dark Habits” (1983). Otherwise, every image is majestic and beautiful but feels a bit emotionally uniform in the spirit of a Thomas Kinkade painting. Even though the films were probably shot around the same time, due to “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” delaying release, one scene feels like a copy of “Superman” (2025), which wore it better.
Oddly enough Kogonada’s interior sequences resonate with the energy of the past, especially the way that he makes it feel lived instead of a gimmicky bid to garner praise through nostalgia for a bygone era. The atmosphere is bone deep, not superficial. The musical sequence is charming because it is often hilarious when an actor plays a character who is not an actor then is expected to perform like Lady Mary in “Downton Abbey: A New Era” (2022) and/or Jamie Lee Curtis in “Freaky Friday” (2003). When the pair of actors are just committed to the scene, not describing or analyzing it, it is more fun. Constantly having to shift gears and reset with a verbal orientation sucks the life out of the momentum. It is just as important for the audience to feel as swept away as the characters.
It is interesting that Kogonada appears to be developing a couple of go to muses. Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith played a married couple in “After Yang” (2022), which thrummed with more visual beauty than “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.” Here, Turner-Smith plays the GPS voice—does that make her a magical Negro? The cast is fairly stacked with Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge appearing as unnamed characters who work at a car rental company styled as a warehouse sized audition room.
Would I pay to see “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” if I was not a film critic? No. If you get two pretty, talented, personable people together, then of course they will get together, but at least “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is aiming for a more substantial foundation for the pairing such as emotional intelligence and breaking generational curses. Unfortunately, this film is being released at a time when the resurgence of the romcom is taking exciting, innovative and provocative big swings and mostly landing punches. This new wave even includes horromcoms. Kogonada was at his best when he was filming his own work in his debut film, but lately he has relegated himself to working on critically acclaimed adaptations like Apple+ series “Pachinko” and now someone else’s heavy-handed script. He needs to get back to the keyboard and tell his stories, which were more textured, all-consuming and riveting. This movie is fine, but little about it sticks to the bones.
