A road to love paved with cliches

Two strangers revisit old wounds via GPS in director Kogonada's try-hard romance.

- AMY NICHOLSON FILM CRITIC

MATT KENNEDY Sony Pictures

MARGOT ROBBIE and Colin Farrell in "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey."

"A Big Bold Beautiful Journey" is a surreal, color-saturated quest about healing childhood scars in order to have healthy adult relationships. It's a corny road trip.

Directed by the monomonikered Kogonada ("After Yang") from a script by Seth Reiss, this sputtering high-concept love story is about two singletons, Sarah (Margot Robbie) and David (Colin Farrell), who meet at a wedding and carpool home in a mystical rental sedan guided by a bossy GPS (voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith) that forces them to explore why she cheats and he swings from hot to cold. Their meandering, inevitable path to romance pit-stops at magical portals — actual doors standing alone on the shoulder — that transport them to each other's pivotal memories, say the hospital where Sarah’s mother died or the auditorium where a 15-year-old David first got his heart broken. It’s not time travel exactly; they can’t change their history. Consider it Waze-navigated regression therapy.

Who wouldn't be curious to see Ebenezer Scrooge take a Tinder date to meet his girlfriends past? It’s adorable to see Farrell relive starring in a high school class musical, leaping, twisting and grinning through the dorky choreography. I even liked the tidy coincidences that lead David to rent a 1994 Saturn from two pushy desk clerks (Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge) who seem to know more about him than they’re saying. As Waller-Bridge says in a testy German accent announcing the film’s theme, “Sometimes we have to perform to get to the truth." (Or in David's case, belt a few verses from "How to Succeed in Business Trying.")