Margot Robbie’s Mattel movie is lousy

The packaging of “Barbie” is much more enjoyable than the tedious toy contained in the field. 

Ingeniously, a yearlong barrage of Mattel propaganda was foisted upon us and created a resistance-is-futile Summer season of Barbie earlier than anyone knew if the film was any good. 

There have been pop-up cafes, a Without end 21 clothes collaboration and viral Instagram filters galore. 

After which the precise movie arrived. To virtually quote the Aqua track: Life in plastic — not incredible.

“Barbie” is an exhausting, spastic, self-absorbed and overwrought disappointment.

Arthouse director/co-writer Greta Gerwig (the very good “Girl Hen” and “Little Ladies”) and co-writer Noah Baumbach (“Marriage Story“) have churned out a smug story that doesn’t boast a single sympathetic character. It does, nonetheless, have loads of ethical platitudes and pinky-out mental jokes.

Halfway via this company money seize masquerading as an artwork set up, a teenage lady shouts at Margot Robbie’s Barbie in a California highschool cafeteria: “You symbolize all the pieces unsuitable with our tradition. You destroyed the planet along with your glorification of rampant consumerism — you fascist!”

Barbie, not used to being criticized, cries, “She thinks I’m a fascist?! I don’t management the railways or the move of commerce!”

That eye-roll-worthy interplay neatly encapsulates the complete enterprise’s high-on-its-own-supply humorousness that all the time comes on the expense of character and plot growth and turns off anyone who’s making an attempt to have a great time.

Worse, the spat underlines the filmmakers’ delusion that this “Barbie” is one thing extra than simply one other ploy to promote merchandise.

Gerwig’s film begins with a cliche. A narrator (Helen Mirren) says, “For the reason that starting of time, there have all the time been dolls,” as a gaggle of little ladies encompass an enormous Barbie and violently smash their previous toys to smithereens. It’s sending up the monolith scene from “2001: A Area Odyssey” that has been parodied without end.

Mirren then goes on to inform us of a utopia known as Barbie Land, the place a various array of Barbies and Kens inhabit a matriarchal society by which a Barbie is president (Issa Rae) and the Supreme Courtroom is made up completely of Barbies. 

All of them dwell in Malibu DreamHouses, go to the cardboard seaside, innocently flirt with Kens and dance at slumber events.

For those who’re hoping to expertise a multiverse of distinctive, strong-personality Barbies, you’re higher off going to Toys R Us after just a few martinis. Performed by Hari Nef, Dua Lipa, Nicola Coughlan and Emma Mackey, amongst others, the group members all act equally and are frustratingly interchangeable with few standout moments.

Each Ken (Ryan Gosling, Scott Evans, Simu Liu and extra) is, predictably, a moron.

The narrator provides that Barbie Land residents consider that, “due to Barbie, all issues of feminism and equal rights have been solved” out in the actual world. 

Every Barbie, you see, has a plastic toy stand-in on earth. As an example, Kate McKinnon’s Barbie (one of many few shiny spots) has hacked-off hair and coloured traces on her face as a result of a little bit lady “performed too exhausting” and tossed her in a field.

However when traditional Barbie (Robbie) unexpectedly develops an infatuation with loss of life, discovers cellulite on her stomach and will get flat toes, she is compelled to enterprise out into the actual world by way of convertible, boat and rocket ship to set her baby proprietor on the correct path.

The true world right here, in a weird alternative, is Los Angeles. What a missed alternative.

LA, evidently, doesn’t look or behave all that in a different way than Barbie Land, and hardly any actually humorous fish-out-water antics occur on this movie.

Barbie meets Will Ferrell’s Mattel CEO, who, in one in every of many shrugged-away plot holes, is absolutely conscious of Barbie Land and believes that information of its existence poses some type of risk to America that’s by no means absolutely defined.

The writing, throughout the board, is lazy. Gerwig and Baumbach’s script doesn’t have to be believable. It’s about Barbies, for God’s sake. However each time it takes a bonkers narrative leap, any individual cracks a joke about what’s occurred as if the viewer is a culture-less rube to ever query the movie’s logic.

Two unusual scenes involving Rhea Pearlman from “Cheers” are actual head-scratchers. 

And a mother-daughter pair performed by America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt are flatly conceived and textureless.

Drama, kind of, comes when Ken turns into obsessive about the actual world’s patriarchy and masculinity and brings them again to upend Barbie Land. What enjoyable.

Gosling’s dumb hunk shtick begins out foolish however wears skinny as we understand that’s all it’s gonna be.

The visuals are higher than the storytelling. The artwork route is engaging and intelligent, if loud and too small-scale. I wished to discover extra of Barbie Land and fewer of Century Metropolis and one LA workplace constructing.

But, you all the time really feel that “Barbie” pales compared to different exaggerated stranger-in-a-strange-land movies, akin to “Pleasantville” or “Elf.”

And within the realm of toys, “The Lego Film” has much more coronary heart, comedy and creativity than this movie does.

What “Barbie” achieves is being an empty film designed for the vacuous social media age, by which crucial half is snapping a photograph of the poster.