Barbie

Directed by Greta Gerwig, Barbie follows Margot Robbie’s title character as she experiences an existential crises that ultimately throws her entire world into chaos. It’s an appealingly off-kilter premise that’s employed to initially watchable yet progressively intolerable effect by Gerwig, which is a shame, ultimately, given that Barbie boasts an exceedingly agreeable opening stretch that’s heightened by Sarah Greenwood’s striking production design and Robbie’s note-perfect turn as the iconic central figure – with Robbie’s superb work certainly echoed in the top-notch efforts of such periphery players as Kate McKinnon, John Cena, and Ryan Gosling. (Michael Cera’s scene-stealing appearance as Ken’s friend Allan remains an ongoing highlight within the proceedings, to be sure.) There’s little doubt, then, that Barbie‘s downfall is triggered by a midsection that grows less and less interesting (and more and more grating) as time progresses, as Gerwig, armed with her and Noah Baumbach’s bloated screenplay, increasingly emphasizes attributes of a thoroughly questionable nature – with, especially, the inclusion of oddly (and aggressively) didactic digressions wreaking havoc on the picture’s momentum. (There is, for example, an almost astonishingly heavy-handed sequence, involving a character’s hackneyed speech about women and the expectations placed upon them, that brings the narrative to a complete and total stop.) It’s worth noting, too, that Gerwig squanders what should’ve been slam-dunk ideas and concepts, with this particularly true of the film’s handling of Barbie‘s tiresome real-world exploits (ie the expected fish-out-of-water elements never materialize), while the absolutely interminable final stretch ensures that the whole thing ultimately concludes on a thoroughly anticlimactic note – which does, in the end, cement the movie’s place as an overlong misfire of distressingly epic proportions.

*1/2 out of ****