Title – A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025)

Director – Kogonada (After Yang)

Cast – Colin Farrell, Margot Robbie, Hamish Linklater, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Kevin Kline

Plot – After meeting at a wedding event, New York City residents David (Farrell) and Sarah (Robbie) are taken on a fantastical journey by their cars GPS, reliving their pasts and learning for the future.  

“Relive your past. Change your future”

Review by Eddie on 19/09/2025

No one’s going to accuse acclaimed indie filmmaker Kogonada of not taking a big swing with his feature film iteration of Seth Reiss’s screenplay but sadly for all the visual beauty and well-intentioned life lessons A Big Bold Beautiful Journey has, it’s not enough to save this overtly sappy and too often ill-advised escapade from itself.

The type of film that is going to divide a large portion of its audience between the willing admirers and those that can’t stomach the film all the way to the end credits, Journey is an unashamedly fanciful film that wears its heart on its sleeve for better and worse and while Kogonada’s commitment to the cause can be commended, it’s clear to see on end result that the talented director got the balance wrong this time around.

Destined to be one of the years more notable big studio bombs despite the presence of two well-liked A-list stars in the form of Colin Farrell (here ending his recent hot streak) and Margot Robbie, there’s a universe where Journey might just have been balanced perfectly between the whimsical, the philosophical, the heartfelt and the fantastical but while you can see what Journey is trying to do you never really feel it, the beating heart that was important for its success always held at arm’s length, as we are instead taken on an aesthetically pleasing but hollow road trip to nowhere.

Asking a lot of Farrell and Robbie, who are required to do all the films heavy lifting acting wise, with the two doing perfectly fine considering the script they are bringing to life and the scenarios they are thrust into that are often mere inches away from veering into extremely trite territory, Journey gets some decent moments between the two leads and some of their banter and interplay stands out amongst the films more clumsy segments but it’s not enough to drive Journey forward to become the tale it was seen to be when it found its way onto the Black List of unmade screenplays.

A huge anchor to Journey’s overall traversing of its waters is the fact that Kogonada and Reiss aren’t at all interested in explaining in any great depth the reasoning behind so much of their films fantasy elements.

We as audience members shouldn’t always be expected to have our information spoon fed to us and I’m a great believer as many others are that sometimes leaving some questions unanswered or interpretation open to discussion is a good thing but Journey takes those sentiments a little too far with many likely to be left frustrated by the endgame of Kogonada’s film that feels more like a cop out than a powerful statement, making much of what has come before far less impactful than it might have been for those that endured the time to get there.

Final Say –

An undoubtedly well-meaning film that has some undeniably important and impactful messages to deliver, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a wonderfully crafted but emotionally empty feature film experience that never quite finds its own self amongst its many grand ideas and concepts.

2 Whoppers out of 5