A Big Bold Beautiful Nap
Korean-American filmmaker Kogonada has built a solid reputation on delicate, meditative films like Columbus and After Yang. These are works that quietly explored grief, connection, and identity. His latest, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, brings together Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie for a fantasy-infused romance that should have soared. Instead, it stumbles into something far less inspiring: a muddled experiment that proves ambitious but ultimately exhausting and extremely disappointing.
A Promising Setup
After a flirtatious encounter at a wedding, David (Colin Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie) reconnect at a highway café, spurred into adventure by a talkative GPS voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith. Their road trip is anything but ordinary—each countryside stop reveals a magical door that plunges them back into formative memories. David relives the pain of teenage heartbreak during a school musical, while Sarah confronts her guilt over abandoning her dying mother. These surreal detours peel back the layers of who they are and why they remain romantically adrift.
A Clash of Styles
On paper, it’s intriguing. In practice, it’s a tonal car crash. The whimsical set-up recalls Big Fish, but Kogonada drags in the bruising realism of Manchester By The Sea, resulting in an awkward marriage of whimsy and grief. Scenes of teleporting through memory sit uneasily beside heavy-handed reckonings with infidelity, regret, and loss. By the time Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge pop up as eccentric car rental staff (with Waller-Bridge adopting a baffling German accent), it feels like we’ve switched channels entirely.
Wasted Talent
Farrell and Robbie are compelling, doing their best to anchor the film’s wandering tone. Farrell’s restrained presence and Robbie’s openness inject fleeting humanity into otherwise frustratingly written characters. Yet even they can’t overcome the uneven script and jarring tonal swings. It’s as if Kogonada, normally a master of subtle emotional resonance, lost sight of the story he wanted to tell.
The Verdict
There are flashes of beauty—moments where memory and love intersect in ways only Kogonada could conjure—but they’re buried under clashing genres, half-baked whimsy, and indulgent narrative choices. Instead of a big, bold journey, what audiences get is a confusing and lethargic trek that feels far longer than its runtime.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey may have ambition and big names on its side, but in the end, it’s one for the nap, not the memory.
