By Adam Bloodworth
Barbie movie review and star rating: ★★★
I can only assume the Barbie movie PR team have checked into the most beige hotel possible this week, cowering from all the pink to engage in some much-needed deep breathing. The movie’s ballistic marketing campaign has been even more omnipresent on social media than the endless stream of engagement photos from people you went to school with. So, now that the film is actually coming out, and we can, I assume, stop being confronted by photos of a beaming Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling on Instagram, we get to the question: is it any good?
One year ago the idea of a Barbie movie seemed absurd, and on release week, it feels even moreso, with the queues of adults lining up to take pictures in Barbie-themed photo booths across the country reminding us that the national misery post-Covid must be even worse than we thought.
Surprisingly, the Barbie movie is sharp and satirical, led by an eminently watchable Robbie, who plays Stereotypical Barbie who lives in a Barbie World where everyone is a type of Barbie: even the President. Ryan Gosling plays Ken – again, there are loads of Kens – who’s matched with Stereotypical Barbie. It is a matriarchal world in opposition to the real world, but then one day Stereotypical Barbie and Ken breach Barbie World’s utopic walls to discover that the real world and – yep, you guessed it, systemic sexism – exists and kinda sucks.
It is all one self-knowing, grandiose joke, fun to go along with if you’re old AF, and, I’m sure, more than enough to keep the current Barbie doll generation silenced. “Because of Barbie, all problems with feminism and equal rights have been silenced,” a voiceover says, as legions of mathematically attractive Barbies gleam from their fake world. Rhea Perlman – the mum from the first Matilda movie – who plays a sort of Oracle figure to Barbie, flies close to the sun with her character’s brand of weirdness: “I got into this business because of little girls and their dreams – in the least creepy way possible.” At another point, a meta director’s note disrupts the film, acknowledging that despite the film claiming to be about the every woman, Robbie is just impossibly pretty.
Of the lot, Gosling leans most enjoyably into the satire. All snarling pouts and infuriating naivety behind the pretty face, his Ken plays on the reality that there really are so many men who don’t understand their power and privilege.
Robbie and Gosling have warm chemistry against the backdrop of an interlocking landscape of impossibly pretty pink sets that play with the notion of what’s real and fake. You feel that they must have had so much fun pulling all this together. Well, for the first few weeks, before nausea set in.
Mattel’s profits have declined over the past few years, and there’s no getting away from the fact that this movie is a deft PR stunt designed to reposition Barbie for a new generation. But the hype is also real and not entirely engineered. Feeling heavily inspired, if not uncomfortably in debt to, storylines from Toy Story and the Matrix, I’m not sure this movie needed to exist, but it’s a hoot that it does.
The Barbie movie is in cinemas from Friday 21 July
