- Content: “Has Some Issues”
| None | Light | Moderate | Heavy | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Language | ||||
| Violence | ||||
| Sex | ||||
| Nudity |
What You Need To Know:
A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY has funny, dramatic, sad, winsome, and tender moments. The best scenes are when they revisit David’s high school while he performed the lead in the school play, HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS. Or, when Sara gets a chance to spend an evening with her late mother. Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie deliver appealing performances as the romantic leads. However, A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY needs more joyful moments. It also has a Non-Christian, mystical worldview with lots of unnecessary, often annoying, gratuitous obscenities and profanities. So, the movie is ultimately unacceptable.
Content:
Slightly mixed pagan worldview in a mystical romance about two people brought together by a strange and mystical car rental agency, the romance has nothing specifically God-centered about it, but there are a couple scenes honoring positive parent-child relationships and promoting taking a risk on love and commitment;
At least 35 obscenities (including 24 or more “f” words), two or three strong profanities using the name of Jesus Christ, and seven light profanities;
A car crashes when it hits a deer and rolls over multiple times, but the two people inside are unhurt;
No sex;
Upper male nudity in one scene;
Some light alcohol use;
No smoking or drugs; and,
Movie doesn’t explain how the romantic couple is able to travel into the past.
More Detail:
Colin Farrell stars in the movie as David, who leaves his apartment in New York City to drive his car to the wedding. However, when he gets to his car parked on the street, he finds there’s a parking violation boot on his tire. On the building wall next to his parking space, there’s a makeshift ad for a Car Rental Agency nearby.
It’s started to rain, so David takes his umbrella, gets on the subway and takes the train to the agency, which is located in a dark alley. The agency seems to be located in a warehouse. David walks through the large door and into the warehouse. It’s a huge, mostly empty space with a car sitting in the middle and, at the far end, a table with two people sitting there, a woman and an old man. The woman talks to David, but she’s very strange and her speech is peppered with “f” words.
The woman convinces David to sign up for the car’s GPS system. When he reminds her that he can use his smartphone to do that, she reminds him that a cell phone can lose its power.
David drives to the wedding venue, which is more than 250 miles away. On the way, the female voice on the GPS asks David if he wants to go on “a big bold beautiful journey.” He hesitates for a second and says, “Yes.”
At the wedding, David spies a beautiful blonde woman named Sara, played by Margot Robbie. Though attracted to one another, they don’t quite get along. Also, Sara tells David that, if they ever did starts a romance, it would end with her hurting him because she always does that. So, they remain separate.
The next day, the GPS lady leads David to a diner to get a hamburger. Who should be there but Sara. David’s car from the rental company starts, but Sara’s car, from the same rental company in New York City, doesn’t. The female voice in David’s GPS system advises him to offer Sara a ride, and she accepts.
The GPS lady starts leading Sara and David on a “big bold beautiful journey.” She leads them to actual doorways into their past. The journey isn’t always so beautiful, however. One doorway leads to a moment at David’s high school, where he was playing the lead in HOW TO SUCCEEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING. David told the girl playing the female lead in the musical that he loves her, but she rejected him for another boy. Another doorway takes Sara to the day her mother died when she failed to make it to the hospital in time.
As their journey together continues, David and Sara start falling for one another. The romance hits a roadblock, however, when the GPS lady takes them to a restaurant where David broke off an engagement to a woman from his past and where Sara was having an upsetting dinner with a boyfriend.
So, the question is whether this new romance will ever take root?
A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY has funny, dramatic, sad, winsome, and tender moments. The most entertaining sequence was David performing the early part of the high school musical. Sara even gets into the act, and they leave the stage together while singing one of the play’s fun, iconic songs. The most touching scene is when Sara spends a night with her mother. Through all this, Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie deliver appealing performances. That said, the movie would have been better if it had inserted more joyful scenes like the ones during the high school play.
Sadly, A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY has a fair number of gratuitous, annoying “f” words. There are also two or so strong profanities. A joke toward the end compares the car rental agency to a soulmate finding agency. So, there’s a mystical, nonbiblical atmosphere surrounding the agency and the GPS system that leads David and Sara into the past. Also, the movie makes no reference to God or God’s commandment for men to leave their parents to unite with their wife. The movie implies that David and Sara are meant to be together, but a revelation at the end suggests that may not be true. Ultimately, A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY is unacceptable.
