A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

At first glance, Kogonada appears to be continuing his ascent from media study video essayist to major filmmaker. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is his third and biggest narrative feature, expanding the budget and reach of his highly acclaimed Columbus (2017) and After Yang (2021). This time out, Kogonada lets others handle writing and editing, making this his first feature as a for-hire director. The credits are not mere trivia, but a caution to those who have pegged the mononymous Korean American as an artist to watch.

Veteran comedy scribe Seth Reiss, who made a fine feature debut on 2022’s biting The Menu, opts for something that is simultaneously harder to classify and yet more familiar than his breakthrough script. Journey leans heavily upon a 2000s style of offbeat comedy, recalling works like Stranger Than Fiction and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with a mere fraction of their originality and little of their success.

Colin Farrell plays David, an Irish-American man who finds his car with a boot on its tire on the weekend he is to attend a wedding. A perfectly-placed sign leads him to a car rental experience like no other. In an oversized warehouse, David is the only customer and the two employees helping him (Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge) wield his headshot like casting agents before connecting him with a 1994 Saturn and upselling him on a GPS device. At the wedding, David gets introduced to Sarah (Margot Robbie), a woman who lives in a different part of his same unnamed city.

Sparks do not fly, even though words, a dance offer, and a marriage proposal ensue. But the shared social function is but the start of David and Sarah’s journey. A seemingly improbable reunion at Burger King and a broken car later, the two are following the GPS device’s directions together and ending up at remote doors that take them to various chapters from each of their pasts.

With its magical realism and calculated quirks, Journey harks back to some of the better films from two decades ago, but much too cute for its own good, it pales in comparison. David and Sarah’s adventure through space and time never packs the emotional wallop it’s supposed to and even as a mere romcom couple, the two don’t win us over as intended. The whimsy is all over the place, not just in the space-time continuum but narratively. We come to understand where past romances fell flat for each lead and some of the family drama that continues to hang over them. But the stops on this journey are belabored and meandering.

Farrell and Robbie, each wielding one of the strongest resumes among their respective age groups, tap into their well-established goodwill to elicit sympathy, but their characters and trajectories are a collection of dramatic tropes, period details, and allusions to much better movies.

For example, the GPS has the red eye of 2001‘s menacing computer HAL. When the car bursts into flames, Kogonada copies the staging directly from Planes, Trains and Automobiles. It’s a safe bet that someone watching a theatrically released, original R-rated movie in 2025 is a fan of cinema and will appreciate the homages scattered throughout. It’s also a safe bet that these nods will not dupe moviegoers into thinking they are watching a cutting-edge new classic.

Reiss’ screenplay fails the film more than Kogonada’s direction, which is full of visual flair when it wants to be but repeatedly falls back into a conventional presentation of tired themes. There is nothing but the ages of the cast that will tie this film to 2025 and while that alone is no problem, you expect more from two actors we’ve seen in a few of the decade’s best works who have their well-earned pick of Hollywood projects at their disposal.