Movies should be 90 minutes. Even at just under two hours, Barbie feels long. And it's not like there wasn't anything to cut: everything before the return to "Barbieland" could have been drastically condensed. And that's about half the film. There are some funny bits in that first half, but it's not till the second half that the main plot actually begins.
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| Image: Warner Bros. |
That said, the jokes are very hit-and-miss. Some, like Ken's job being "beach" (because he's "Beach Ken", not "Lifeguard Ken" or "Surfer Ken" or anything else more specific) are funny. Others are repeated too often or just don't work at all. And a lot of them stand as examples of one of the film's major issues: it's trying to be too many things at once. It gave me the impression of a script that had been completely rewritten a couple of times with elements left over from earlier versions.
A lot of the jokes in the early parts of the film revolve around them being toys, like Ken not knowing what he'd do if he spent the night with Barbie, or Barbie floating to the ground from her house rather than using the stairs because that's how kids get their dolls in and out of their houses, but it's all very inconsistent. They're sort of toys but sort of not, and for the first half of the film it seems like they're going somewhere with that, but it ultimately ends up being irrelevant. And a lot of it doesn't even make sense in that context; like why is Robbie's character "Stereotypical Barbie"? That's not a thing. She should be just "Barbie" - as opposed to President Barbie and Astronaut Barbie and so forth. Or, when her feet "flattened" why didn't anyone recognise that as being Ken-like? They act like they've never seen flat feet before, but Ken is right there.
"The things that are good about Barbie ... end up being steamrollered by all the things this movie is trying so hard to be. ... Barbie never lets us forget how clever it’s being, every exhausting minute" (Zacharek, 2023).
The same is true of the Mattel executives. They're introduced in a way that suggests they're the major antagonists of the film, but they aren't. They're a momentary obstacle, but then they continue to hang around for the entire rest of the film for no apparent reason.
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| Image: Warner Bros. |
What I'm calling the "main plot", the story of Kern taking over Barbieland and the Barbies taking it back, was very good. If they'd gotten to that quicker it would have been a much better movie. But too much time is spent on the set-up in Barbieland, and then about the same amount of time again spent in the "real world". But, aside from Ken getting to see how the "real world" works, it's all in service of the B plot. And the B plot is bad.
The film starts with Barbie becoming weird. Her feet flatten, she starts thinking about death, etc. and it turns out that it's being caused by the woman her owns the toy version of her in the "real world". Which doesn't make a lot of sense given that each type of Barbie is represented only once in Barbieland but they're not all Barbies owned by one person. It's every type of Barbie ever made, and it seems like there's only one Barbieland, but somehow only one human maps to each Barbie as their owner. You're obviously not supposed to think too hard about this, but the movie put too much attention on it for me to ignore it.
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| Image: Warner Bros. |
Anyway, there's a few more jokes about Barbie and Ken trying to interact with the "real world" and the section where the Mattel executives are introduced, and in between all that we find out that Barbie's owner is having trouble communicating with her daughter; and theoretically that's going to be resolved by the end of the film, but it kind of just happens for no reason. This is one of the things that seems left over from an earlier version of the script: one where either the mother or daughter would have been the protagonist. But here they just sort of tag along.
Then the good bit happens: Ken takes over Barbieland, there are some good jokes (not a 100% hit rate, but decent), the Barbies figure out how to outwit him and take it back, and we all learn that sexism is bad. A lot of people seem to have somehow missed the point of this bit because the Barbies don't actually fix sexism, so maybe it could have stood to be a bit clearer, but you're not supposed to think Barbieland is perfect at the end. It's a reversal of real-life sexism where men are marginalised instead of women, intended to make you notice things that you might overlook due to familiarity in real life. It's fine. Not particularly novel or revolutionary, but it's fine.
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| Image: Warner Bros. |
Then the movie keeps going. It feels like the end, but it isn't. And this is where the message really does get muddled and confusing, and I honestly couldn't tell you what they're trying to say with this bit. The executives are there, the ghost of Ruth Handler is there, Stereotypical Barbie turns into a human somehow, mother and daughter like each other now, and it was really boring and I don't know why the movie wasn't over.
"If it’s surprising to find Barbie holding forth on the plague of the patriarchy and the contradictory expectations faced by women, it’s more surprising to discover that the movie doesn’t ultimately want to do much more than talk itself in circles about these themes" (Willmore, 2023).
Over all, the movie seemed to be reaching for something it could never grasp. It felt like it should have been a lot darker and more subversive but had to be suitable for the children who are obviously going to want to watch a Barbie movie. It compares unfavourably with Life in the Dreamhouse, which aims a lot lower but actually hits the target. I'd honestly recommend that show over this movie. Not that this movie was bad, it just wasn't very good. And at no point does any character say "Hiya, Barbie. Do you wanna go for a ride?" One of the songs in the end credits uses bits of Barbie Girl but I think that's the only reference.
The worst part of the movie, though? Getting hit in the head by a chair seat cushion someone threw from the back of the cinema.
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