Film Review - Barbie (2023)

Barbie is based off of the Mattel toy and is directed by Greta Gerwig and co-written by her and Noah Baumbach and stars Margot Robbie as what she calls Stereotypical Barbie who lives in her dream house, has big parties and is the focus of attention of Ken (Ryan Gosling) but when thoughts of Death come into her mind she is told by Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) to go into the Real World and find the person who plays with her and fix it.

Barbie was a movie I was curious about mainly because I love Gerwig as a director, I loved 2017’s Lady Bird and adored 2019’s Little Women but the previews for this movie were all over the place and I thought to myself This will either be terrific fun and Gerwig has done it again or it would be a near total disaster like Lightyear was last year where I sat there and thought “Who is this For?”

Well it is neither of those sadly but it is still good enough and I enjoyed myself enough to feel positive about this movie for the most part, Robbie is the best she’s been in what feels like a very long time here after 3 very high profile misfires in Birds of Prey (which she also produced as well as this movie), Amsterdam and Babylon the latter 2 of which I felt had interesting elements to them but on the whole weren’t great but here she’s lively, energetic, warm, funny as well as emotional and all of it works very well.

And I actually enjoyed Ryan Gosling for once in a movie and he is someone I have barely liked in movies save for 2016’s The Nice Guys but here like with Laura Dern and Emma Watson in Little Women Gerwig actually directs him like a human being instead of a human equivalent of the Living Statue where in so many roles he just either sat there or stood there and stared into the camera or stared off into space and I got so sick of it even in movies like First Man which I really liked he did it there but here he’s very charismatic and lively and has a lot of great moments as does Simu Liu my favourite Ken plus Michael Cera and America Ferrara who is very good as a Mattel executive with a moody daughter of her own.

But this movie as fun as it is doesn’t quite come together I feel to make it as satisfying in terms of its focus and storytelling that I felt Lady Bird and Little Women had and a lot of this comes down to the ending which I didn’t love now I did love seeing that person again in a movie but their scenes didn’t quite work for me and they felt a little jarring with the “come on Barbie let’s go party” feel the film was going for at times.

And also Will Ferrell as the head of Mattel was okay but really deep down was only doing a riff on his much better Lord/President Business character from the Lego Movie in 2014 as well as not really having an awful lot to do apart from run around comedically and react to the strange goings on around him.

And so that was Barbie and its fun enough that I recommend it but I don’t feel it sticks the landing well but Gerwig has yet to make a bad film and I hope she continues for a long time to come as I’ll be there every time, 3 out of 5.