‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’ review: cute romcom falls into the friend zone

Though it was bumped back from its original release date in May – never an encouraging sign – romantic fantasy film A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is no disaster. It’s more like a slightly awkward first date where the fitfully interesting moments aren’t enough to convince you that you’ve actually had a great time.

Most of the laughs come early when downbeat but dishy David (Colin Farrell) stumbles into a surreal car rental agency run by oddballs – they’re played by a bone-dry Kevin Kline and an impish Phoebe Waller-Bridge who speaks in an absurd cod-German accent. It’s probably the most fun she’s had on the big screen yet.

The agency bods persuade David to take a car with GPS – “in case your phone craps out” – and he drives to a wedding that he’s attending with no plus one. There, he meet-cutes with sparky but guarded Sarah (Margot Robbie), a fellow singleton flying solo. Their brittle banter has a stilted quality that initially seems knowing – is screenwriter Seth Reiss gently sending up Hollywood rom-coms? Sadly, it’s not the only time this film’s ambiguous tone fails to convince.

David flirts with Sarah without getting very far but they’re thrown together again after the wedding by a twist of fate – or rather, an instruction from his rental car’s apparently sentient GPS. When it tells him to stop at a service station and buy a “fast food cheeseburger”, he finds Sarah already there, tucking into one. It turns out she hired a car from the same agency but hers has broken down, so she hops into David’s passenger seat so they can continue their journey together.

At this point, the narrative asks for a hefty suspension of disbelief that it never fully rewards. As David and Sarah cruise along an anonymous highway, the GPS (voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith) tells them when and where to stop. At each location, they walk through a magic door that takes them back to a pivotal moment in their past. They’re whisked to David’s high school where he relives being rejected by his first love, and to a hospital where Sarah is told by a doctor that her mother has just died.

This exchange never happened, she confesses, because when her mother really was on her deathbed, 19-year-old Sarah was “screwing” her college professor. Slowly but surely, these two lonely people open up to one another but the overall effect is curiously muted. Director Kogonada, whose glittering filmography includes 2021’s soulful sci-fi movie After Yang and multiple episodes of Pachinko and The Acolyte, includes some cute visual nods to cinematic classics including 1964’s fabulous The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg, but nothing here truly dazzles. In fairness, Kogonada isn’t helped by a schematic screenplay that’s more conventional than it seems. Each magic door yields a trite psychological insight into one of its leads: she’s scared of commitment because she lost her mum! He’s still single because he prefers the illusion of a meaningful relationship to the humdrum reality!

Despite stellar efforts from Farrell and Robbie, it all adds up to something not quite charming, not quite moving and not quite compelling. This film is less a big bold beautiful journey; more a mildly diverting pitstop.