I’ve always had trouble with the fantasy genre, though there are many cases when the form works wonderfully. Great examples include The Wizard of Oz, Beauty and the Beast (the 1946 Jean Cocteau version), It’s a Wonderful Life, A Matter of Life and Death, Orpheus, Ugetsu, The Seventh Seal, Groundhog Day, and Being John Malkovich. But it’s a risky genre, so often sinking into leaden whimsy and artifice that it never gets any liftoff into the uncanny or the magical. And there you are, stranded among images of talking animals in hats and flying cars and actors exuding fake awe or some other such hellish scenario.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey tells you, just by its try-hard title alone, that it’s going to be one of those cringe-inducing fantasy romances. Its release has been postponed several times, never a reassuring sign, and even the trailer conveyed a high ick factor. The film stars Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie as wary singles David and Sarah who go separately to the same oddly run used car rental place, the Car Rental Agency, in order to take a road trip to a wedding.

There, two eccentric clerks, played by Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, urge them to purchase the GPS option on the ancient Saturns they’re renting. The GPS functions as a godly guide to what becomes the forced fantastical journey they go on together. They encounter a series of magic doors along the way that lead them to interludes from their pasts, repeat experiences that might allow them to unload their emotional baggage and forge a future together.

Written by Seth Reiss, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is the new film by Korean-American director Kogonada, whose first two features, Columbus (2017) and After Yang (2021), were very well received critically. Kogonada got his start creating video essays for such prestigious cinematic organizations as Sight and Sound magazine and the Criterion Collection. The director, whose birth name is Park Joong Eun, derived his professional name from that of the screenwriter Kogo Noda, a frequent collaborator of the renowned Japanese auteur Yasujirō Ozu.

All of which is all very swanky and high culture, I must say, and After Yang was a polished but slightly opaque art film quite in keeping with such a background. But A Big Bold Beautiful Journey seems to be striving for popular emotional appeal that it never achieves. It’s selling very few tickets so far.

There are a couple of scenes that are genuinely moving, but they involve character actors in small roles who look and act like regular people. Hamish Linklater, playing David’s father, pulls off a memorable tearjerker of a scene with Farrell that is so heartrending it ought to get him an Oscar nomination, and Lily Rabe as Sarah’s mother is almost as good in her poignant key scene with Robbie.

This brings us to the stars who dominate the proceedings. Farrell and Robbie give their all, but they’re undone by the very thing they were presumably hired for — their stardom. They’re such good-looking hotties, such gleaming A-listers, with such remarkable charm, especially in this degraded era of mostly repulsive celebrities, that it’s ludicrous to have them playing ordinary people getting on a bit, age-wise, and suffering from loneliness and terminally messed up personal lives.

Farrell can be made to look like a miserably aging, seedy, friendless old lad — just watch him in The Banshees of Inisherin. But the director’s got to do something to tamp down his typical Farrell traits. You can’t put him in front of the camera all handsome and Irish and bristling with tomcat allure and ask us to believe he’s going to a wedding alone in a state of sad-sack dejection. He looks like he’d be going so he could sleep with every woman there including the bride, and maybe the groom too, just for kicks.

And when Robbie is first introduced to us as Sarah, emerging from her crappy rental car in a steady downpour, haloed by an umbrella, it’s almost a laugh-out-loud moment, she looks so gorgeously fresh from the makeup chair and lit to perfection, with her big Barbie blue eyes and high cheekbones and wide pink luscious mouth aglow. What the hell is Kogonada playing at?

When Sarah and David, standing in the pews as the bride passes by at the wedding, immediately lock eyes across the aisle, it doesn’t have the impact of two regular people who are attracted to each other. It plays more like two top stars who mistakenly wound up at a D-list event are now signaling each other to meet up at the back door and escape in a limo as soon as possible.

Later when we learn more about the beautiful, effortlessly charismatic Sarah and David, who are nevertheless supposed to be sad, broken people, we find out that they were actually theater nerds in high school, who can move seamlessly into performing the lead roles of the old-stage musical warhorse, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, knowing all the lyrics, singing and dancing with geeky abandon.

Actually, according to online bios, Robbie was a performance-obsessed girl growing up, and Farrell was bit by the acting bug as a boy as well. So, whether or not they were ever the truly nerdy, acting in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey was probably still good nostalgic fun for the actors themselves. But any youthful nerdiness they might have had has been so thoroughly planed off Robbie and Farrell by spectacular long-term success, it doesn’t come across in the film.

Kogonada is going after a kind of deliberate naive theatricality in the film’s affect that reflects his preoccupation with finding a way to restore belief and joyful acceptance in people hardened by experience: “I really like this question about, can you restore belief in the possibility of love? As you get older, as you get more cynical.”

In making the film, the director was influenced by anime, especially the films of Hayao Miyazaki such as Howl’s Moving Castle, My Neighbor Totoro, and Spirited Away. The film’s composer is Joe Hisaishi, who works with Miyazaki and a few other Japanese directors and “has never soundtrack-ed a Western film.”

In short, a lot of care, thought, and design detail, typical of Kogonada’s films, has gone into this one as well. It just doesn’t help make it any livelier or more compelling.

The film’s color scheme, for example, is dominated by a few childlike primary colors —intense blue for David’s clothing, deep red for Sarah’s. The doors leading to interactive memories of their separate pasts are also color-coded in blue and red. As they interact more and their resistance to each other and the world breaks down, they begin to wear neutral colors — gray, black, and white, blank-slate colors that might complement any other hue. And the door colors become mixed and complicated.

But then their emotional defenses are up again, and they return to blue for David, red for Sarah. If you track this sort of thing in movies — and really, it’s almost impossible to miss here — you have plenty of unengaged mental space in which to wonder what colors they’ll wear for the inevitable reconciliation and happy ending. Shades of purple, a blend of red and blue? Or will they swap colors — David in red, Sarah in blue — to indicate their willingness to adapt to each other?

I’ll leave it to you to guess. My general sense is, like the rest of the movie-going public, you’ll probably never bother to go find out for yourself.