Warner Bros. Pictures presents Barbie in UK cinemas on July 21, 2023.
Synopsis
Barbie suffers a crisis that leads her to question her world and her existence.
Review
With all the hype around Barbie going into the film and the discussions over which film people are seeing first on July 21st– Barbie or Oppenheimer- and with the fantastic cast and creatives attached to the film (directed by Greta Gerwig, written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling and Will Ferrell) it’s safe to say the excitement level for this film was pretty high. Add in a sole guy with a megaphone outside the cinema shouting at a line full of critics that grown adults shouldn’t be wasting two hours of their life by watching a film about a Barbie doll, and the excitement shoots through the roof. And Greta Gerwig’s third solo feature film doesn’t disappoint.
Right from the opening pink Warner Bros. logo, Barbie throws colour and joy in your face. Barbie lives in a utopian Barbieland where all the Barbies are happy and all the Kens are vying for their attention, believing that because of them, all the problems of feminism and equal rights are solved in the world. But after starting to think thoughts of death and getting (*gasp*) flat feet, Barbie must leave Barbieland and venture into the real world to fix things.
In Barbieland we meet an ensemble of different Barbies and Kens including those played by Dua Lipa, Emma Mackay, Simu Liu and Kingsley Ben-Adir but it is with Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Stereotypical Ken (Ryan Gosling) that the film focuses in on.
Robbie and Gosling are perfectly cast in their roles. Not just in terms of looks, but the humour that the pair bring to the role and the chemistry that the two have on screen together lights up the film. No one else could play this Barbie but Robbie. And whilst it is Barbie’s film, Ryan Gosling absolutely steals the show as Ken giving the best comic performance of his career and one of the best comic performances of the decade.
Barbie has quite literally everything. From musical numbers, beach-offs, car chases, meta humour and everything in between, Barbie is the crowd-pleasing film of the summer. Everything from the production design to costumes and hair and makeup is immaculate. One slight problem however, and you might expect this given the large ensemble, is that some of the cast including Ncuti Gatwa and Jamie Demetriou are slightly, or indeed very, underutilised but there are nuggets of gold from some of the minor cast members including when Helen Mirren’s Narrator delivers the best line of the film causing the entire cinema to erupt with laughter.
Barbie goes hard on the comedy and the heart, whilst also tackling some of the critiques of the Barbie doll including body image and sexism. It does feel like Gerwig squeezes out everything she wants to say about these critiques of Barbie a bit too early on and as a result struggles to find the right ending for the film. Barbie ends a little deflated but nonetheless it goes above and beyond what you’d expect from a film about a Barbie doll.
Verdict
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is laugh out loud funny but it’s also complex and underwritten by emotion and real-world issues of gender equality and agency creating a gem from start to finish leaving all Barbies and Kens with a smile on their face.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
