A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is vacuous nonsense

The script for unconventional romantic comedy A Big Bold Beautiful Journey spent some time on Hollywood’s Black List, where well-liked but not yet picked up screenplays sometimes linger for years. It’s a shame it didn’t just stay there. Margot Robbie’s first screen outing since her megahit Barbie two years ago is a disappointing hot mess of self-consciously quirky, meaningless nonsense in which an anthropomorphic Sat Nav (voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith) takes two drop dead gorgeous, emotionally troubled adults on a road trip that puts their past traumas in the rear-view mirror en route to its final destination: true love.

Sarah (Robbie) and David (Colin Farrell) meet at a wedding, where an initial attraction is hampered by their improbably quick admission that they would in all likelihood end up hurting one another. It’s a meet-cute laden with clichés of epic proportions. He’s a brooding nice guy who wants to be a dad and doesn’t like to dance. She’s a self-confessed serial cheater and free spirit who asks him to marry her within the first five minutes. How will they ever get together?

Luckily, both Sarah and David have rented cars from the same strange New York agency, where they were provided with a GPS that keeps sending them together to weird doors in the middle of the countryside, on the other side of which lie moments from their past that unsubtly explain the flaws that are holding them back: David’s greatest high school humiliation (prompting a pathological need to feel special); Sarah’s shame over her behaviour when her mother died (triggering a lifelong fear of inadequacy). What luck! It’s like a sort of speed dating service where they are forced to admit their worst selves before the main course has even arrived.

I have yet to come across a more annoying “manic pixie dream girl” (an eccentric female character whose sole purpose is to help a sad man embrace life) since Natalie Portman in 2004’s Garden State. Sarah’s eccentricities are loudly proclaimed through everything from her dialogue (“Hold your breath!” she shouts suddenly in a way that’s meant to be charmingly playful but absolutely isn’t) to her outfit: short jeans, mismatched knee-high boots and a baker boy cap so reminiscent of Keira Knightley’s character in Love Actually (a fellow MPDG) that it is surely intentional. Sarah’s late mother is also described lovingly as a woman who never said no, so perhaps scriptwriter Seth Reiss (The Menu) simply thinks self-sacrifice is the paragon of female virtue.

Farrell is marginally less irritating, but his dialogue is still appallingly hackneyed. “You’re magic. A formidable f***ing force,” he coos, without ever saying anything he actually likes about her (is it that she remains skinny while proclaiming to eat burgers every day?). It’s a whimsy reflected in the film’s vivid aesthetics. Director Kogonada used to make video essays on Wes Anderson and although this film is nice to look at with its surreal yellows and reds, there’s a sense of Anderson’s sometimes stylised vacuity here too.

It’s a great shame, because the film isn’t without humorous moments, such as when Farrell rents his 1996 Volkswagen Passat from a mad professor type (Kevin Kline) and a sweary maniac with a suspiciously inauthentic German accent (Phoebe Waller-Bridge). The pair are hilarious, and Farrell’s seriousness is a perfect foil for their zany scheming.

But the plot never quite makes sense (why is no one that surprised by those time portal doors?) while at the same time is weighed down by so much on-the-nose over-emoting that the viewer never has a single second to think for themselves. We know precisely why everyone is the way they are, and yet end up not caring about any of them.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is in cinemas from 19 September