Spoiler Alert! Major plot points are revealed in this review.

Mattel’s Barbie opened at the Regent Saturday night to a packed house. An all-ages crowd, with a sprinkling of kids, and lots of pink and mauve. All lit up on a rainy Saturday night, the Regent was a pretty sight.

Nothing like the candy-coloured confection on the screen however, where every pink is hot, and, when mixed with neon yellow, practically blinding. Director Greta Gerwig’s film is, as they say, a visual feast. If obvious precursors include Toy Story and The Lego Movie, the high style of The Stepford Wives, The Truman Show, Into the Woods and Edward Scissorhands informs the creation of Barbieland, a matriarchal paradise of Barbies and Just Kens.

A medley of films and genres inform what starts to feel a general smash up. Romance, quest, coming-of-age, thriller, comedy, and music video all slide into one another. The experience is akin to scrolling through an endless Tiktok, every window giving way to a different framing, even a different story.

The film begins as a traditional quest, a genre associated with the idea of coming-of-age. Barbie is about growing up, and leaving one’s toys behind. One-dimensional Stereotypical Barbie, the heroine amidst dozens of other Barbies, begins to feel strange. A visit to Weird Barbie (brilliant Kate McKinnon) — she’s what happens if played with too much: she has weird hair and is always doing the splits — reveals she must find her owner, the person who plays with her in Reality.

Barbie and Ken take to her pink convertible, and hit the proverbial yellow brick road. A host of black-suited Mattell executives — led by Will Ferrell, in an echo and reversal of his role in Elf — then chase Barbie back to Barbieland in what becomes an action-adventure. Worlds collide, and the film starts to fragment as different perspectives and experiences surge to the surface.

Ken, who has discovered patriarchy, now takes centre stage. He rebrands Barbieland as Kendom, and moves into Barbie’s dream house, turning it into his “mojo dojo casa house.” He then suggests Barbie become his “long-term long-distance low-commitment casual girlfriend.”

The film then morphs into a self-help/romantic comedy, as Barbie and Ken come to terms with one another, and with themselves. If this is the funniest part of the film, an extended satire of mansplaining social roles and romance tropes that have gone on too long, it also feels like a wrong direction. The story can’t seem to get itself straight.

The best parts involve Rhea Perlman playing a Jewish mother, who offers tea and wisdom in a comforting kitchen (pretty much the only good part of Reality). It turns out she is the Creator, and She wishes her creatures to be free.

The film is deeply unsatisfying – the musical numbers — I forgot, it’s also a musical — offer welcome relief from an intensity both empty and exhausting, much like the colour palette. The film’s message is too mixed: if the redemption of Barbie as a feminist icon, the first doll to tell girls they could be anything, and be independent while doing it, is strikingly successful, there is zero effort to move away from Margo Robbie’s perfect Barbie brand of stunning blond beauty. The film is in love with her, and only her, from start to finish.

On its surface, Barbie is about leaving a make-believe world invented by corporate America behind — but to the end, the film is only truly interested in Barbie and her dreamworld. As, perhaps, it should be. It is after all an extended advertisement, produced by Mattel. Weird Barbie is already available in stores, as is the Mojo Dojo Casa House Ken doll.