****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****
My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Underwhelming and disappointing. If you’re desperate to see it I’d say save your money and wait until it hits a streaming service.
I had no intention of seeing Barbie, the new blockbuster about the iconic Mattel doll starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, because I didn’t HAVE to see Barbie. You see, when I worked as a cultural critic for RT I had to watch and write about a lot of stuff I wasn’t that interested in simply because other people were interested in it which meant that it was culturally relevant. Well, I no longer work for RT so I no longer have to do that.
So, when Barbie came along, I just thought, due to the film’s obvious cultural politics and the fact that the film’s writer/director is Greta Gerwig – someone whose work I’ve never thought much of, it wasn’t for me so I’d skip this new battle in the endless and tiresome culture war.
But then Barbie, due to its relentless and highly effective marketing campaign, became an undeniable phenomenon, hauling in over a billion dollars at the box office and igniting a fan frenzy not seen at cineplexes in years, so I thought maybe I should see it. And then my wife said she wanted to see it…and whatever Lola wants…Lola gets! My thinking was, if people are going so nuts for this film - then maybe it’s worth seeing.
I went to a 10:30 AM screening on a Tuesday morning. Barbie had been in theaters for over two weeks at this point and still my screening here in mundane Middle America was totally sold out. Barbie is, like the recent Taylor Swift tour, satiating a primal need among our collective feminine culture for a massive communal “event”. An example of this eventizing impulse was that the theater I attended, which admittedly is not particularly big, looked like a sea of Pepto Bismol as it was overwhelmingly packed with pink wearing middle aged women (including one wearing just a big pink t-shirt…which didn’t cover nearly enough of her nether regions as it should have!) as well as teenage and pre-pubescent girls donning a ton of pink…along with some rather unfortunate looking pink-clad teen boys imprisoned in the friend zone desperate to win favor with their girl crushes with whom they were attending the screening.
My hope in seeing Barbie was that it was good and that I’d like it – I wasn’t the least bit interested in hate watching it. I fully expected to dislike the de rigueur girl power politics – something which I find to be pitiful and pathetic, but I hoped to like the film despite its predictable politics…something which I often do (for example my review of Promising Young Woman) if for no other reason than my own personal politics are so unorthodox.
The opening scene was a perfect example of what I was hoping for…as the film opens with a glorious homage to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Gerwig replaces Kubrick’s monkeys with little girls playing with baby dolls and the mysterious monolith is replaced with a towering Margot Robbie as Barbie. While I was off-put by the visual of little girls smashing babies (even if they are dolls) in reaction to their newfound Barbie evolution, I still nodded in approval at this brilliant bit of moviemaking and it filled me with great anticipation for what followed.
And then I watched the rest of the movie. Unfortunately, it was all downhill from there as the film meandered aimlessly through a convoluted yet corporate cookie-cutter plot, allergic to profundity or purpose, and never even remotely approaching the genius of its opening.
In totality Barbie is an underwhelming, disappointing, cheap, shoddy, shitty, bland, boring, corporate money-grab wrapped in a vacant, vapid and vacuous feminist manifesto. In other words, Barbie is a poorly made version of exactly the thing it often pretends to belittle and/or satirize.
The film begins in Barbieland, a matriarchal utopia devoid of not only male power but babies or children….even the lone pregnant Barbie is exiled to the outskirts of girl boss heaven. The bit of the film initially set in Barbieland is ever-so-slightly amusing at first and then it gets old very, very fast. There’s a dance number in this Barbieland sequence that is supposed to be fun and funny but that is so anemic and tiresome as to be astounding. The low point is when Gerwig uses a ridiculously cliched record scratch to inject reality into the phony festivities. Yawn.
The final two-thirds of the film feature Barbie venturing to the “real world” – which is nothing like the actual real world, and the “real world” venturing in to Barbieland. All of it is sloppy but the scenes in the “real world”, in particular, are a total storytelling and cinematic shit show devoid of any redeeming cinematic qualities. The Barbie in the real-world, fish-out-of-water stuff shockingly doesn’t even muster a minimal amount of comedy.
To be fair, I did laugh out loud a few times during Barbie, all thanks to the aggressively amusing Ryan Gosling who absolutely crushes it as the desperate and dim-witted Ken. Gosling is destined to be nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his unbreakable and unshakeable performance as Barbie’s platonic boy toy.
Speaking of the Oscars, it’s 100% guaranteed that there will be a Barbie-themed musical number at this year’s Oscar ceremony. You can absolutely bet your life on that. You can also count on Mattel to turn the success of the Barbie movie into a Broadway musical…which is an eerily similar concept to the hysterically funny Marvel musical featured in the Disney Plus series Hawkeye…except Mattel won’t be making the Barbie musical ironically.
Margot Robbie is ridiculously gorgeous and perfect as Barbie but there isn’t much there, there. Robbie’s physical perfection is all she needs to play this part and when she’s asked to do more than that her acting is undercut by a really abysmal script that is chock full of cringe, freshman level women’s studies diatribes that ring hollow and feel forced making Barbie feel less human than she already is.
Besides the glorious Gosling, the other supporting performances in Barbie are shockingly devoid of life.
Who knew that both Kate McKinnon and Will Ferrell could not only be so unfunny, but so bland and so forgettable? You’d be hard pressed to find two more energized comedic actors but on Barbie they seem constrained to the point of comatose.
Somewhat surprising is that for a movie full of Barbies, there’s only one attractive one in the bunch – Margot Robbie…and she is certainly very attractive despite the sneaky and obtuse internet marketing campaign prior to the film’s release arguing that she isn’t. I have no problem with a Barbie movie featuring the vast diversity of the Barbie doll collection…which means we get a black Barbie, a fat Barbie, a wheelchair Barbie, a trans-Barbie and so on…but what befuddles me is why do all these Barbies have to be so “beauty-impaired” and visually unappealing?
The rest of the supporting cast are all interchangeable, dull and completely forgettable. Issa Rae and Simu Liu are like two sides of the same charisma-deficient coin. Neither one is remotely interesting or likeable.
Michael Cera as Allan feels like he’s in an entirely different movie…maybe because the script he has to work with is so incoherent and idiotic.
America Ferrera plays Gloria, a mom and Mattel employee, and she is utterly abysmal. She does get to have the big monologue in the movie which begins with “it’s literally impossible to be a woman…” and goes downhill from there. This monologue has middle-aged women across the nation pumping their fists in the air like gold chain and muscle shirt wearing Guidos at a Rocky movie when the Italian Stallion gets off the canvas and beats the shit out of the villain du jour. But here’s the thing…I understand the perspective behind the “it’s literally impossible to be a woman” monologue, but the fact is it isn’t “literally” impossible to be a woman…billions of women do it every minute of every day. Yes, it is no doubt difficult to be a woman due to the constant contradictions one must navigate…but you know what else is equally difficult…being a man. The obstacles and difficulties one must face and overcome as a woman are no harder than the ones men must overcome, they’re just different.
Life is hard for human beings, and for modern day feminists to claim empowerment by perpetually play the victim all while demonizing men, is pretty repugnant and frankly counterproductive.
Barbie also does what our awful culture has normalized which is to conflate masculinity with toxic masculinity, a perilous proposition since it is unquestionably masculine men that carved out a safe space in a dangerous world where women are free to make insipid and insidious films about how awful men are.
My wife, a very, very independent, powerful and, dare I say it, feminist woman, turned to me after the film and the first thing she said was that she found it to be “damaging”. As the mother of a young son, she felt the film sent a negative message to girls and woman not just about the nature of men and boys but about what it means to be a girl/woman, so much so that it depressed her and made her fear for the future. And I must say, I completely concur with her astute observations.
I’ve heard it said that Barbie is Black Panther for white women, and that is very true as Black Panther was an overhyped, shitty movie too that became super successful because seeing it was an act of cultural-political virtue signaling.
Other movies have somewhat captured the cultural political zeitgeist in the same way that Barbie has but from a different angle. For example, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper was a terrible movie but flag waving numbskulls flocked to see and support it because it reinforced their patriotic – or rather anti-liberal, bona fides. That American Sniper was a God-awful movie regardless of its politics was irrelevant as all the flag-wavers loved it even before it started – they loved it simply because it existed…just like the pink clad buffoons are enamored by Barbie regardless of how obviously bad it is.
Sound of Freedom is another movie that is a virtue signal movie currently in theatres. Sound of Freedom is about the scourge of child trafficking and has become a cause celebre for anti-libtard right wingers and as a result has done exceedingly well at the box office – raking in over a hundred million dollars. No doubt the crossover of American Sniper fans with Sound of Freedom fans is enormous. I’ve not seen Sound of Freedom…mostly because I just assume it is poorly made…but I can plainly see that it’s a virtue signal movie just like Barbie.
Another film I thought of when watching Barbie was, ironically enough, The Passion of the Christ. Mel Gibson’s 2004 film smashed box office records for an independent film and made him something like half a billion dollars since he financed it himself. Gibson wisely marketed the film directly to churches and church groups and it became a cultural signifier among Bush loving right wingers.
The marketing of The Passion of the Christ was remarkable, as, just like Barbie, everyone was talking about it even if they hadn’t seen it. Barbie’s marketing was brilliant because it removed the film’s politics from the campaign, made it seem as if it were for adults AND kids (it’s not for kids!) and it was absolutely everywhere. You couldn’t escape the Barbie marketing machine, and frankly still can’t. That the marketing campaign has succeeded in making Barbie a cultural phenomenon doesn’t diminish the fact that the movie is garbage.
Truth be told I’ve never understood the critical love for Greta Gerwig’s films. Gerwig’s 2017 film Lady Bird was so overrated as to be astonishing. Critics adored the film yet I found it to be painfully thin and embarrassingly amateurish. It seemed to me that Gerwig, much like Jordan Peele who came out with Get Out in the same year (2017), was cashing in on the angry liberal political hysteria of the post-Trump election and were being elevated due to their race and gender, not their talent. Having seen both of Gerwig’s and Peele’s films since 2017 has only reinforced my belief regarding their lack of talent and skill and the absurd critical love they’ve received.
As for Barbie, I’ve had a rather interesting perspective on the film as I’ve watched from a distance as the usual suspects on both the left and right instinctively and reflexively loved or hated the film. Having finally seen the movie I can say that people who love it, who when pressed on its numerous shortcomings all say the same thing in defense of it, namely that “it’s fun!”, are delusional dupes and dopes. On the flip side, many of the critics reflexively hating it are so stuck on its politics that they don’t even care to examine the filmmaking….which feels less delusional than just plain disingenuous.
As for me, I didn’t like Barbie for the sole reason that Barbie isn’t a good movie. Barbie isn’t funny and it isn’t interesting. That the film pretends to be rebellious, if not revolutionary, in its messaging, but then spews out the most corporate-friendly and approved, pedantic neo-feminist pablum, wrapped in a cavalcade of visually listless, dramatically lifeless, comedically flaccid scenes, makes it feel like watching a pink-hued Human Resources film for corporate employees to learn the new Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office rules.
The bottom line is that the masses being so enamored of Barbie says considerably less about the quality of the movie than it does about the easily manipulated morons populating our world and their astonishing level of group-think and gullibility, as well as the sorry state of our society and cinema.
Unfortunately, so few people nowadays are self-aware or introspective enough to resist massive marketing campaigns like the one around Barbie, which brainwashed otherwise intelligent people into not only mindlessly devouring this odious, rancid corporate pink taco but declaring they love it. I too succumbed and took a bite of the gigantic, rancid corporate pink taco that is Barbie, but to my minimal credit I at least am not foolish enough to don an oversized pink t-shirt sans pants and shriek “yummy…how fun!”
In conclusion, it is literally impossible for me to recommend Barbie.
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