Barbie is every bit as good as you wanted it to be (2024)

Life in plastic is fantastic indeed: Barbie is a sharp, hilarious and joy-contagious satire of gender roles where the famous Mattel doll — and boyfriend Ken — go through an unexpected journey of self-realisation. It is as deliciously stupid as it is bright, a feminist fairytale where there's always room for dancing, rollerskating and beaching.

Margot Robbie takes on the role of the OG Barbie as she was born to, although nobody is having more fun than Ryan Gosling, who is absolutely hysterical as Ken. This pitch-perfect casting is top of the movie's many hits, alongside its fabulous soundtrack, killer pink-themed art design, and self-conscious sense of humour.

Directed by Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, Little Women) and co-written with her partner, filmmaker Noah Baumbach (White Noise), Barbie is a delight. Its mere existence as a big-budget, star-studded, female-focused Hollywood comedy is almost a miracle – even if it might be a little bit too fabricated for its own good.

The movie follows Barbie on her best day ever, which is every day in Barbie Land, a country where women are the workforce and men just wander around the beach trying to snatch Barbies' attention. One day, Robbie's Barbie finds herself suddenly thinking about death. Her usually high-heel-shaped feet have flattened, she spotted some cellulitis in her thigh and she's having depressing thoughts as she questions the meaning of her plastic life.

Guided by the outcast Weird Barbie (played by Kate McKinnon), Barbie decides to find the root of her problems by travelling to the real world, where she thinks her kind has long fixed everything in women's lives.

However, after following the pink brick road — the references to The Wizard of Oz are abundant in the story — she realises human reality is much more complicated than life in Barbie Land.

Barbie tastes the unfair shame of being harassed ("I feel self-conscious but it's myself I'm conscious of?" she says), deals with some nasty Mattel executives led by Will Ferrell, who want to put her back into a box, and finds out the doll's legacy is actually seen as antiquated and misogynistic by younger generations. Not the best day ever, really.

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Barbie's existential crisis is the emotional core of the story, while Ryan Gosling's Ken is the explosive backbone turning the movie into the year's most sensational comedy.

The character is pure stupidity as he 'beaches' with Simu Liu's Ken, sings sad songs shirtless under the moonlight, and tries to find himself after living his whole existence in Barbie's shadow. Gosling's performance skills are first-class in the glorious, Singing in the Rain-inspired musical numbers throughout the movie. His Ken-ergy is flawless, his commitment to the role unmatched.

Honestly, everybody in Barbie seems to be having the best time, and it's positively contagious.

Greta Gerwig finds the right balance between nailing the satiric take on toxic masculinity and showing a genuine, unconditional love for Barbie's history and her creator Ruth Handler, who has a special role in the movie (played by Rhea Perlman). It's not an easy feat, but it still feels effortless.

As expected of Gerwig, relationships between mothers and daughters are a big theme in the same vein as Lady Bird, while Little Women's inspiring messages about women finding their path in a patriarchal world resonate with this layered take on Barbie.

The director builds up the story from a collective feminine imagination where Legally Blonde, Clueless and even BBC's Pride and Prejudice TV adaptation are unmissable references.

It's filled with countless movie references, from The Matrix to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and blessed with a gargantuan cast including Issa Rae, Alexandra Shipp, Michael Cera, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Hari Nef, Sex Education's Emma Mackey and Ncuti Gatwa, singer Dua Lipa, and more. Barbie is Gerwig's biggest, most demanding movie to date, as the Oscar-nominated director continues to explore what it means to be a woman in the world.

Granted, Barbie's take on feminist theory is fairly basic, which is not a problem since this is a comedic-driven parody about a little girls' doll — we're not looking for a PhD dissertation on gender studies.

As the movie argues, we shouldn't ask women to always be perfect, accomplished or extraordinary, and we shouldn't ask a female-led, female-focused movie to be more than a highly amusing, extremely clever comedy obsessed with colour pink.

Ending up with a version of Feminism for Dummies wouldn't be such a bad thing considering the state of the world sometimes, but Barbie tries to be more than that. The movie makes convincing and smart points not only about femininity, but especially about the foundations of toxic masculinity and how it operates in our day-to-day lives.

Funny stereotypes aside — jokes about Zack Snyder's Justice League will cut deep for some — Barbie argues maybe it's the Kens who need to evolve.

Kudos to Mattel for allowing such a free-spirited, unfiltered tale around their precious doll, even at the expense of turning their fictional all-male executive board into the ultimate representation of how businessmen vampirise women's hopes and dreams.

All in all, viewers can read as much as they want into what Barbie is trying to say about the world and the everlasting — and somehow outmoded — battle of the sexes, but there is one indisputable fact: Barbie is terrifically entertaining. And that's ken-ough.

Barbie is out now in cinemas.