Real talk: the new film by Kogonada has the shittiest title of 2025, but is it also the worst film? The sad news is: quite possibly. Despite star firepower in Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a misguided, heavy-handed effort, that works hard to be profound but earns almost none of its many, many melodramatic revelations.

Farrell plays David, who rents a car in New York from two quirky characters played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Kevin Kline, who aren’t quite what they seem (think: irritating wink-at-the-camera guardian angel types, e.g. Bruce Willis in North). He’s on the way to a wedding, where he meets Sarah (Robbie). The two allegedly hit it off, despite their guarded positions. I say “allegedly” because there is zero chemistry between Farrell and Robbie and only the invasive soundtrack of twee folk, playing almost constantly through the movie, suggests otherwise.

We’re told early that David is a reserved man who lives a restricted life; he doesn’t dance at weddings, he’s stopped dating. Sarah, on the other hand, is straight out of the manic-pixie-dream-girl playbook; she’s a free spirit who flirts hard with men, but it’s all a façade to hide a fear of intimacy and rejection. For reasons not worth going into here, David and Sarah embark on a BBB journey through a series of magical doors that transport them to formative earlier moments of their youth. Here, they confront family relationships and unpack scenarios which shape and galvanise their adult lives.

The vibrant colour palette of BBBJ is its best (and most marketable) quality, but colour alone cannot overcome the stolid literality of Seth Reiss’s screenplay, which mainly involves Farrell and Robbie, both stiflingly wooden, reliving D&Ms with exes or parents, ad nauseum, until they arrive at tepid and robotic self-discoveries. Does David’s pickiness in finding a partner result from his parents always telling him he was special as a child? Maybe. Should Sarah have been screwing her college professor while her mum died in hospital? Probably not.

Each scenario is intended by Kogonada to be a transformative experience. And it’s possible that with livelier dialogue and better characterisation, it would have been. This is, after all, Kogonada’s wheelhouse. Before making feature films, he garnered acclaim for his video essays that often imported his emotions and interiority into the form and structure of classic films. Kogonada, more than anyone, knows the power of film to generate inner meaning. It’s such a shame then, that BBBJ is a deeply impersonal and leaden experience.

 

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey opened yesterday in cinemas.