‘Barbie’ review: Margot Robbie’s Mattel movie is lousy

The packaging of “Barbie” is a lot more fun than the tedious toy inside the box. 

Ingeniously, a yearlong barrage of Mattel propaganda was foisted upon us and created a resistance-is-futile Summer of Barbie before anybody knew if the movie was any good. 

There were pop-up cafes, a Forever 21 clothing collaboration and viral Instagram filters galore. 

And then the actual film arrived. To almost quote the Aqua song: Life in plastic — not fantastic.

“Barbie” is an exhausting, spastic, self-absorbed and overwrought disappointment.

Arthouse director/co-writer Greta Gerwig (the superb “Lady Bird” and “Little Women”) and co-writer Noah Baumbach (“Marriage Story“) have churned out a smug tale that doesn’t boast a single sympathetic character. It does, however, have plenty of moral platitudes and pinky-out intellectual jokes.

Midway through this corporate cash grab masquerading as an art installation, a teenage girl shouts at Margot Robbie’s Barbie in a California high school cafeteria: “You represent everything wrong with our culture. You destroyed the planet with your glorification of rampant consumerism — you fascist!”

Barbie, not used to being criticized, cries, “She thinks I’m a fascist?! I don’t control the railways or the flow of commerce!”

That eye-roll-worthy interaction neatly encapsulates the entire enterprise’s high-on-its-own-supply sense of humor that always comes at the expense of character and plot development and turns off anybody who’s trying to have a good time.

Worse, the spat underlines the filmmakers’ delusion that this “Barbie” is something more than just another ploy to sell merchandise.

Gerwig’s movie starts with a cliche. A narrator (Helen Mirren) says, “Since the beginning of time, there have always been dolls,” as a group of little girls surround a giant Barbie and violently smash their old toys to smithereens. It’s sending up the monolith scene from “2001: A Space Odyssey” that has been parodied forever.

Mirren then goes on to tell us of a utopia called Barbie Land, where a diverse array of Barbies and Kens inhabit a matriarchal society in which a Barbie is president (Issa Rae) and the Supreme Court is made up entirely of Barbies. 

They all live in Malibu DreamHouses, go to the cardboard beach, innocently flirt with Kens and dance at slumber parties.

If you’re hoping to experience a multiverse of unique, strong-personality Barbies, you’re better off going to Toys R Us after a few martinis. Played by Hari Nef, Dua Lipa, Nicola Coughlan and Emma Mackey, among others, the group members all act similarly and are frustratingly interchangeable with few standout moments.

Every Ken (Ryan Gosling, Scott Evans, Simu Liu and more) is, predictably, a moron.

The narrator adds that Barbie Land citizens believe that, “thanks to Barbie, all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved” out in the real world. 

Each Barbie, you see, has a plastic toy stand-in on earth. For instance, Kate McKinnon’s Barbie (one of the few bright spots) has hacked-off hair and colored lines on her face because a little girl “played too hard” and tossed her in a box.

But when classic Barbie (Robbie) unexpectedly develops an infatuation with death, discovers cellulite on her belly and gets flat feet, she is forced to venture out into the real world via convertible, boat and rocket ship to set her child owner on the right path.

The real world here, in a bizarre choice, is Los Angeles. What a missed opportunity.

LA, needless to say, doesn’t look or behave all that differently than Barbie Land, and hardly any truly funny fish-out-water antics happen in this film.

Barbie meets Will Ferrell’s Mattel CEO, who, in one of many shrugged-away plot holes, is fully aware of Barbie Land and believes that knowledge of its existence poses some kind of threat to America that’s never fully explained.

The writing, across the board, is lazy. Gerwig and Baumbach’s script doesn’t need to be plausible. It’s about Barbies, for God’s sake. But every time it takes a bonkers narrative leap, somebody cracks a joke about what’s happened as if the viewer is a culture-less rube to ever question the film’s logic.

Two strange scenes involving Rhea Pearlman from “Cheers” are real head-scratchers. 

And a mother-daughter pair played by America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt are flatly conceived and textureless.

Drama, sort of, comes when Ken becomes obsessed with the real world’s patriarchy and masculinity and brings them back to upend Barbie Land. What fun.

Gosling’s dumb hunk shtick starts out silly but wears thin as we realize that’s all it’s gonna be.

The visuals are better than the storytelling. The art direction is attractive and clever, if loud and too small-scale. I wanted to explore more of Barbie Land and less of Century City and one LA office building.

Yet, you always feel that “Barbie” pales in comparison to other exaggerated stranger-in-a-strange-land films, such as “Pleasantville” or “Elf.”

And in the realm of toys, “The Lego Movie” has far more heart, comedy and creativity than this film does.

What “Barbie” achieves is being an empty movie designed for the vacuous social media age, in which the most important part is snapping a photo of the poster.