Review of Barbie (2023) by Isteffy — 21 Jul 2023

Barbie shines as a comedy when it is self-aware. Some of the comedic writing, paired with the stellar performances of its all-star cast and stylish practical sets, really had me laughing with the rest of audience. Barbie had potential to be a 7-9/10 comedy for me, if the movie was only this self-aware comedy with a bit of ‘heart’ sprinkled in.

Unfortunately, the movie, despite being self-aware at some points, does some shockingly unaware things, with the ‘heart’ of the film, which should have been about the relationship of the mother and daughter, being instead about ‘Smash the patriarchy and replace it with an equally evil Matriarchy!’ Despite Mattel calling it Barbie and Ken’s Dreamhouse, only Barbie is allowed to live in their house, and Beach Ken can just go live on the beach or something. See, in Barbie world, the roles are reversed to the “real world”. You know what I mean, reader, the “real world” where all men are stupid sexist pigs who just got their positions in life because of that big dangly thing between their legs. And the movie really wants to hammer it home to you that the Barbie world is just perfect because it’s opposite the ‘real world’, a world where men (Kens) need to live on the streets like hobos, and only women hold positions of power. A Ken couldn’t hold a high-power position in the real world because they are just so darn stupid!

But are these Kens really so different from the men in the ‘real world’? The movie thinks the men in the ‘real world’ are way worse, especially those darn construction workers! Man, if you are a construction worker, you should probably not watch this movie because the film producers do not think highly of you. The movie takes two separate scenes with separate construction workers to really hammer home that construction workers are just generally sexist pigs and punching them for even talking to you is completely acceptable.

There is a scene where Ken goes to the hospital and tries to talk to the ‘doctor’, but just assumes that the woman he is talking to couldn’t be a doctor, because she’s a woman! Even though Ken literally comes from a world ruled by women and he’s probably never even seen a ‘male doctor’ in his life, they throw away the movie’s own established logic to make a ‘Men so sexist!’ joke. My girlfriend and I counted one male in this movie who was not a complete idiot, and that was the lifeguard who told Ken that he couldnt be a lifeguard because he couldn’t swim, because Beach Ken was too general to have any actual specific talents that could be paying jobs at the beach, making it one of the funny jokes of this movie! Because there are funny, self-aware parts of this movie, it’s just weighted down by this awkward messaging, which goes full-throttle 30-45min into the movie.

The movie could have spent the time that was spent preaching about political messages to flesh out the relationship between the mother and daughter. Instead, the movie barely focused on their relationship. The mother and daughter ‘bonding’ in this movie is literally the mom going on multiple long-winded and chaotic rant monologues about feminism to men, and the daughter going ‘gee I never knew that my mom was a feminist? I love her now.’.

To the Barbie producers, when even my feminist friend is calling your movie ‘sexist cringe’, you gone done messed up! Fighting and ‘ism’ with an ‘ism’ is not cool. Jokes are all fun and games and fortunately many of the jokes here are good, but the serious message of this movie is ‘All men are sexist lazy pigs, and should be subservient to women’. That’s not a joke. That’s the actual ‘lesson’ at the end of the movie.