‘A big bold beautiful trip’ review: Kogonada’s big, bold incorrect


To Weak is neither a writer nor editor who is credited to his third function is the first worrying road sign on this “Big bold beautiful trip“Roles he maintained on both the cool observed, intellectual romance” Columbus “and the cozy, ruminant AI sci-fi”After. ”

His latest filmAn extended, time-jumping romance between Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie as a script-y stick figures captured by a sensitive rental car to literally drives down the memory field in their most formative section, has both embarrassingly serious writing and Nonsensian, incoherent editing. Maybe someone could have asked the film’s director to go away from the camera and on either the front.

Parlning Kogonada with screenwriter Seth Reiss’ (“Menu”) disaster-bound dumping of clichés feels like an insult and an underestimation of the Cannes-crowned filmmaker’s previously proven Bona Fides: It’s not a drama, it’s not a comedy, it’s not a music, but that is a romance, but that is a one one is a one one is a romance, but that is a one that is a romance, but that is a romance, but that is a romance, but that is a romance, but that is a romance, but that is a romantic, but that is a romance, but that is a romance, but that is a romance, but that is a romance, but that is a romance, but that is a romantic, but that is a romantic, but that is a romance, but that is a romance, but that is a romance, but that is a romance, but that is a romantic, but that is a romance? As much as I know is true.

Less noticeable human characters than the forms of people who look like them, David (Colin Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie) are strangers who meet at a common friend’s wedding they both participate in the stay. That the wedding takes place at a hotel called La Strada and on a very rainy day tells us that we are in an imaginative LA-LA-Land with sweet cinematic references and a world where a contradictory meeting-tenant congeals around coincidence and pastels. Robbie, designed in a Newsboy cap and oversized red coat, looks like she just came back from a semester abroad living in Soho, Londontown.

The costumes and production designs are all Jacques Demy through anthropology, color-popped to impose personality on the personalityless (and with bright eyes and mitski on the soundtrack to strengthen indie-subeness). In addition to just looking cheaply and CW-anchoring, the styling only reinforces the level of Artifice and unwillingness to go deeper than skin or morbid cotton-sweet surfaces.

David and Sarah, over almost two test hours developing at the rate you imagine to be forced to redivide the most painful moments of your life to rediscover your inner manic Pixie Dream -children would not be revealed to have any dreams of their own beyond the failed pursuit of love. (Although David’s pasted childhood ability for musicals means something next to character development here.)

A big bold beautiful journey, from left: Colin Farrell, Margot Robbie, 2025. © Columbia Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection
A big bold beautiful trip© Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

They are, rather, cut-outs of rum-com archetypes: david is a sad, lonely man whose father (hamish link clat Late Jill Clayburgh) died when she was a college freshman screwing her professor.

Back up a bit, although the connective tissue is missing here: In the opening sequence, David’s parked car gets the dreaded yellow luggage due to unpaid parking tickets, a note that is pasted the sidewalk that leads him to an ominous rental car company that turns out to be driven out of a layer of a sleeping on the wheel Kevin KLINE KLINE KLINE KLINE KLINE It is the car David takes to the wedding, and the car whose GPS, when David eventually offers Sarah a ride, which promises them both a “big bold beautiful trip”, a phrase that they are supposed to say back to it as a kind of greeting card tasting, reverse “There is no place at home.” The said car then takes them on the said journey, where each stop is equipped with a portal-like door which allows them to enter previous milestones: break-ups, significant deaths, soul-changing meetings with art.

The most charming sequences allow the 49-year-old Colin Farrell to dust away his song and dance skills in a performance, such as his teenage David Self, in a school production of “how to succeed in business without really trying.” Sarah stands up from the audience to fill in the texts after David, who confronts her then childhood girlfriend, grinds the performance to an auditorium freezing. There is another strict Mawkian sequence where David and Sarah both experience their most wounding divisions-David with a woman he was engaged to (played by Sarah Gadon) and Sarah with a cable knot-dressed Billy Magnussen, which she left and haunted in the middle of the night-in.

A big bold beautiful trip, Colin Farrell, 2025. © Columbia Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection
‘A big bold beautiful trip’© Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

The problem here is that David and Sarah learn or get nothing meaningful or revealing when it comes to reconsider old traumas; Like filmmakers, they observe the material as if they move images on a Kodak wheel rather than actually engage with them. While in a movie like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Joel and Clementine played up and relived the past to understand where they have gone wrong in the present, David and Sarah’s only lesson here is that they obviously belong romantic after all, despite his mopiness and tendency to close people, and her life -long people, and her life -longing people and her life -longing people and her lifelong. It is also unfortunate that the actors seem to have an allergy to each other in the Sparks department, with about as much chemistry as the one between two walls that happen to meet each other.

“A big bold beautiful journey” suffers from the fact that Kogonada, which got its start to create online Video essay analyzes Of his favorite films and television programs before debuting with “Columbus” at Sundance 2017 and taking “After Yang” to Cannes 2021, has no personal stamp on the project. This movie is like a spotted watercolor of vaguely wiped feelings next to the pointilistic emotional precision of his previous two films.

The Reiss’ script was a black list and discovered that either was not sufficiently reworked by the committee or was ground in the studio core that all personality was emptied in the process. Kinematographer Benjamin Loeb (“Pieces of a Woman”, “Dream scenario”, “Mandy”) shoots the film more like a happy extended advertising campaign for the AI-powered vehicle that drives the characters against Catarsis, and there really is nothing romantic with a movie that has several moments of Cringe-In-Youor-Sate-Turge-Tour-Turge.

“A big bold beautiful journey” is incorrectly calculated as a romance and a fantasy, and while I am disgusting to blame a craftsman as intelligent as Kogonada completely for the result, after all, he made directing this miserable script. A large, bold, beautiful drilling.

Rating: D+

“A big bold beautiful trip” opens in theaters from Sony Pictures Friday 19 September.

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