This was almost as Impressive as it was enjoyable. It was considerably more than the wittily winking film that the trailers led us to believe we were getting. There was quite a lot more than initially meets the eye...which in a way was the main point of the film. However there were a few moments, in the latter part of the film where it did veer somewhat towards a certain preachiness tone and the (very sound) socio/economic/political points that were being made were perhaps a little too emphatic – as if words in a piece of good writing had been underlined to draw attention to them. To continue this analogy, this underlining was not needed as the words themselves more than effectively make th point. Sometimes audiences do not need to have things over-emphatically drawn to their attention.
The conclusion was particularly effective and, in its way, powerful. I did wonder if it could have been a little shorter, perhaps no more than 15/20 minutes as there was a slight lack of dramatic drive in towards the end (see point above) but this was not a disfiguring flaw.
Performances, like Barbie and Ken, are pretty flawless – I liked the way that the bodies, particularly Ken, were made to look slightly plastically artificial but without over-emphasis. There was a first-rate balance between sending up the creations yet at the same time managing to give them a degree of humanity. Gosling and Robbie were marvellous central creations but all the cast contributed their part to the success of the whole although I did sometimes feel that Will Ferrell was slightly ‘phoning it in’. Much has been made of the visuals – rightly – and what I enjoyed most was that there were a central but not distracting element to the story. They were emphasised to just the right amount to make the point but did not then go beyond that to become the focus in themselves (Wes Anderson I am thinking of you…in some cases).
So go see; you won't be disappointed. I loved the brief narrator meta-interjection we heard some way into the film after not having heard from her (Helen Mirren!!) since the spot-on parodic opening. And the final line is an absolute cracker. You would NEVER guess the final word spoken by Barbie!