A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

Failing to live up to its title, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a romantic road trip that gets stuck in the narrative mud.

This scenic travelogue intertwined with a tale of fate and destiny between two lost souls seeking redemption is more about the journey than the destination. Yet it’s never as poignant or profound as intended.

The eccentricities and visual flourishes in the last project from filmmaker Kogonada (After Yang) yield some fleeting offbeat charms, although cumulatively it’s more pretentious than powerful.

The story is set in a surreal world where it rains when it’s sunny and the GPS in a 1994 Saturn sedan offers personalized travel itineraries.

That’s where we find David (Colin Farrell), a New Yorker who rents the aforementioned vehicle from a sketchy agency with two chattering employees (Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge), to travel to a wedding.

He finds a spark with Sarah (Margot Robbie), who’s a bit more free-spirited but equally troubled. “I’m not afraid of you,” she explains. “I’m afraid of hurting you.”

They go their separate ways until hooked back up by their navigation systems. After realizing they’re stuck together, they dutifully travel to wherever they’re told — basically a series of rural locations, each with a standalone door that opens a portal for them to revisit painful chapters from their lives — past, present, and future.

As much about catharsis as companionship, the voyage forces them to reconcile with their respective pasts by reopening old psychological wounds.

Along the way, their banter ranges from playful and spontaneous to guarded and apprehensive. What feels like impulsive thrills to them feels like cutesy contrivances to us.

Playing characters burdened by guilt, grief, and regret, Farrell and Robbie do their best to bring some depth and tonal consistency to the material. Their chemistry is intermittently endearing.

However, only the most hopeless romantics will buy into the screenplay by Seth Reiss (The Menu), while others are turned off by the forced whimsy and aggressive yanking at the heartstrings.

Despite some lovely imagery that reflects a level of thoughtfulness, there are a few too many stops and starts in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, in which the path to happiness winds up at a dead end.

Rated R, 108 minutes.